The Crime and the Punishment of a Failed Raskolnikov in Afghanistan

Gabriella Körömi

Abstract

The second novel written directly in French by Atiq Rahimi, A Curse On Dostoevsky, calls on the masterpiece Crime and Punishment by Dostoevsky. This novel shows various aspects of the hybridization of the author. The Russian novel is manifest in the French novel in two ways: implicitly by the moral reflections on the divine justice and the human justice, and explicitly by many elements of the text (title, epigraph, paratexts, quotations, paraphrases etc.). Being a lot more than a simple pastiche, the French novel is indeed the rewriting of the famous crime committed by Raskolnikov. It is its intertextuality which makes the novel of Rahimi a kind of dialogue with the novel of Dostoevsky on the mode of the rewriting of the reflections and the reformulation of the questions developed in the work of the latter. What are the similarities and the fundamental differences between the character of Rassoul, main character of Rahimi, and that of Raskolnikov, protagonist of Dostoevsky? How has Rassoul become a failed pasticheur? What punishment are they to be subjected to in a country engulfed in an endless fratricidal war? These are the questions to which the present study will seek to find the answers.