3. Fyodor Dostoyevsky based Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment on the 19th-century French murderer Pierre François Lacenaire
In the 1830s, writer Pierre François Lacenaire murdered a transvestite and his mother in one of the most famous homicide cases of nineteenth-century France. Claiming he was an artist commenting on social injustice, Lacenaire admitted to the murders as a form of protest. With the permission of the state, he gave interviews from his jail cell. The fascinated public consumed information about the murderer, and he entertained them, making his trial into his very own press conference. A jury found Lacenaire guilty of his crimes, and he was guillotined in January 1836.
Almost thirty years later, Fyodor Dostoyevsky was working on his new novel, Crime and Punishment. The author wanted his story to explore the psychological effects of committing crimes and the consequences of those crimes. It was a process that Dostoyevsky knew well. In 1849, after he was sentenced to execution for violating censorship laws, he sat in jail for eight months, waiting to die. As he stood on the gallows, the tsar announced that he had commuted Dostoyevsky’s sentence to hard labor.
From his own experience, Dostoyevsky insisted that waiting for punishment was much worse than the sentence itself. While drafting the plot of Crime and Punishment, Dostoyevsky learned the details of the Lacenaire case, using court records to construct the events of the novel. When Raskolnikov murders Alyona Ivanovna and her sister Lizaveta, he uses an ax, just as Lacenaire used on his victims. Raskolnikov’s justification for his actions that the murders are justified because they will improve society is strikingly similar to Lacenaire’s commentary throughout his trial.