“Crime and Punishment” (Part 3) by Dostoevsky: Raskolnikov said to have “two opposite characters in him, changing places with each other”

Raskolnikov’s friend says, “At times, however, he’s not hypochondriac at all, but just inhumanly cold and callous, as if there really were two opposite characters in him, changing places with each other” (1, p. 215).

The above may foreshadow something to come, but, so far, no character or narrator has been thinking in terms of multiple personality, per se. The most common psychiatric diagnosis applied to Raskolnikov has been “monomania,” which meant they thought he was only partially mad.

A biographer’s interpretation that Raskolnikov committed the murder, because, as a student, his mind had been poisoned by certain philosophical ideas, is suggested by the fact that, as a student, he had written an article “On Crime” (1, p. 258), which justified murder committed by extraordinary people.

But his mother says he had been unusual prior to university: “…I could never trust his character, even when he was only fifteen years old. I’m certain that even now he might suddenly do something with himself that no other man would ever think of doing…” (1, p. 216), although she wasn’t thinking of murder.

It is possible to combine the two interpretations: that what he learned as a student was taken to heart by an alternate personality.

Most multiples are not murderers, but a few have been (2).

1.Fyodor Dostoevsky. Crime and Punishment: A Novel in Six Parts [1866]. Translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. New York, Vintage Classics/Random House, 1993.

2. Dorothy Otnow Lewis, M.D. et al. American Journal of Psychiatry, 1997. “12 Murderers with Dissociative Identity Disorder” [multiple personality disorder] https://ajp.psychiatryonline.org/doi/10.1176/ajp.154.12.1703