Despite having a highly curtailed social media presence, news has reached me that Dostoevsky is in. I am told White Nights, his early career novella, was a bestseller in the UK the year before last.
More darkly in recent years, right-wing influencers like Jordan Peterson have used his work to push their reactionary manosphere ideology on to alienated young men and boys.
I come to him for the first time as a twenty-something man through decidedly more grounded means. I was recommended Crime and Punishment by my girlfriend, who wanted to start reading more classics and was pulled in by its blurb – truly old school.
In that spirit, let me bridge this 160-year-gap. How would a reading benefit such an alienated young man, in 2026?
There are more parallels than one might think. Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikov, the novel’s protagonist, sits alone all day in his St Petersburg hovel, having run out of money to keep himself in law school. Despite being a man of considerable intellectual ability, he lives in poverty, sleeping on a ragged sofa in his dirty old clothes.
The meritocratic promise of a post-serfdom Russia fallen through; he wallows in his loss of status. Many a revolutionary was born this way – educated enough to see the precarity of their financial and social position, then stripped of the future they think they are owed.
Too clever for his own good, he fever-dreams himself as a Napoleon, as a Caesar, dissolving his moral conscience into a utilitarian dogma where the truly great fulfill their historic role without wincing.
To be truly great, you must fill Parisian streets with gunsmoke on the 13th of Vendémiaire, lead legions over the Rubicon, or, murder an old, exploitative pawnbroker in her own tenement. It matters not. The first step is to refuse to submit to an external moral code. The next, is to remake the world in your image.
A toxic cocktail of youthful egotism, idealistic zealotry, and economic desperation boils over. Rodion Raskolnikov skulks up to the fourth floor of a nearby building and buries an axe in a woman’s head.
The most enthralling descent into insanity ever committed to paper then begins. It quickly becomes apparent that he was never a great-man-of-history-in-waiting, never a man of action, of moral compromise in service of greater good, but a man of doubts and thoughts and doubts again, and therefore, by his own criteria, already a failure.
Dostoevsky was criticising the nihilistic thought taking hold in Russia in the middle of the 19th century. Within a few years, Nietzsche would be on the scene. It follows from enlightenment thinking that if there is no God, there is no objective moral code, there is nothing stopping the great from taking the reins for themselves. Indeed, Dostoevsky ensures that crime is indeed followed by punishment, and he offers salvation as Raskolnikov’s way out.
Here is the rub. Those nihilists won. In Russia, godless communists starved millions in their pursuit of utopia. They proceeded to lose last century’s struggle for hegemony to an another clique of nihilists guided not by God, not by dialectical materialism, but by the spectral hand of the free market.
What farce that clickbait reactionaries today use Dostoevsky’s deeply spiritual message to preach exceptionalism. They might pose as Christians, but in telling men to turn inward, not outward, to control rather than commune, to exploit in pursuit of greatness, they become little Napoleons themselves.
And how much worse we have it. With amusing regularity do characters, usually women, sit around in their lodgings waiting for our leading man to show up and sulk at them. Raskolnikov’s mother, sister, friends, neighbours, his landlady’s caretaker, even the police to a degree, display genuine care and concern toward an undeserving egotist.
Could the same be said for many angry young men today? We stand at rationalism’s dead end, a neoliberal rut where the sovereign individual has significantly reduced the role of religion, community, and family in human social life.
I speak not from Dostoevsky’s Orthodox Christian perspective but as a native inhabitant of this dead end. It is with regret I report I saw a dark flicker of Raskolnikov within myself: vain, academic, idealistic, ambitious, impatient.
Across much of the West the average young man is less likely to be university educated than a young woman, more likely to be socially isolated, the most likely to die from their own hand.
Young men increasingly hold outdated views on gender equality and are increasingly likely to support far-right political parties.
When a woman is murdered in Britain today, there is a nine in ten chance she was murdered by a man, an eight in ten chance by a partner or ex-partner.
In Raskolnikov, then, lies a warning for our modern crisis of masculinity. Dostoevsky might offer God; I don’t see a solution in a return to a religious fundamentalism which routinely collapses into open misogyny.
Neither is there salvation in a hyper-individualist hustle culture, where men sit in box rooms vibe-coding their Software as a Service start-up, dreaming selfish dreams of escaping societal constraints.
The structuralist in me is tempted to seek an economic resolution. Is Raskolnikov driven to murder without the underlying impetus of his poverty and the resulting loss of status?
I would argue he is not; material conditions do help make murderers. But Dostoevsky when focuses so strongly on his psychological condition, it feels like the true cause must be incorporeal.
The author stood watching a grand historical process, one that would sweep away the social structures which sought to give each person purpose and status. We built no lasting alternative and so witness the consequences, trapped in a seemingly post-ideological world. In fact, it is capital’s cold logic which is all too happy to step in.
The salve need not be religion either, but it will inevitably involve its essential tenets: community, humility, and love.
Bobby Crosby, 09.03.26
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