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 thepotential of human knowledge. Edgar Allan Poe’s short stories are considered as the beginning of thegenre, and his character Auguste Dupin is the first modern literary detective. F. M. Dostoevsky did notwrite crime novels because the elements of the genre present in his novels participate in the constructionof a different kind. However, this paper will try to look in more details at the key differences betweenDostoevsky 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 onecan recognize one of the early critiques of the fundamental principles and world picture that the genrerepresents.