Podosokorsky Nikolai Nikolaevitch – Candidate in Philology, Senior Re-searcher; Research Centre “Dostoevsky and World Culture”, Institute for World Literature RAS; ORCID: 0000-0001-6310-1579
The article is devoted to the analysis of the paradoxical juxtaposition of Napoleon and the louse in F.M. Dostoevsky’s novel Crime and Punishment. Rodion Raskolnikov, who dreams of becoming the new Napoleon of St. Petersburg, perceives the murder of an old woman, Alyona Ivanovna, as his path to greatness, and at the same time repeatedly and consistently calls her a “louse”. The nature of Raskolnikov’s strange illness, most often defined in the novel as “fever”, is considered. It is proved that “Napoleon” and “louse” are not really antagonistic for the main character, but form a kind of cannibalistic symbiosis.
F.M. Dostoevsky; Napoleon; the louse; Crime and Punishment; the War of 1812; fever in literature