E. A. Poe and F. M. Dostoevsky: The Origin And Questioning of Crime Fiction

Abstract

Crime fiction originated in the mid-nineteenth century, at a time of great positivistic confidence in the potential of human knowledge. Edgar Allan Poe’s short stories are considered as the beginning of the genre, and his character Auguste Dupin is the first modern literary detective. F. M. Dostoevsky did not write crime novels because the elements of the genre present in his novels participate in the construction of a different kind. However, this paper will try to look in more detail at the key differences between Dostoevsky and the classical rules of crime fiction, on the example of the novel “Crime and Punishment”.A deeper understanding of these differences reveals the limits of the genre, while in Dostoevsky one can recognize one of the early critiques of the fundamental principles and world picture that the genre represents.