Is a Woman a Human Being? On the “Funny and Unimportant” Reference to a Magazine and a Book in “Crime and Punishment” of Dostoevsky

The article analyzes an episode in which Razumikhin suggests that in order to save himself from hunger and poverty Raskolnikov translate from German half of a pamphlet, which he eventually calls “Is a Woman Human?” The researchers found that here Dostoevsky was referring to Eliseev’s “Inner Review” and Agrippa Nettesheim’s book “On the Nobility and the Advantage of the FemaleSex,” but interpreted this reference as the most general indication of the relevance of the subject of women at the time of the novel’s creation and suggested that Dostoevsky must have considered Eliseev’s direct reference to Agrippa’s book a hoax. The article shows that this “funny” and “transient” episode is very important in the ideological structure of the novel and was conceived by the author in an almost unchanged form from the ver ybeginning, that is, it represents one of the key ideological structures of the work. It is also shown that Dostoevsky read and extensively used in “Crime and Punishment” not only Eliseev’s “Review” (i.e., to remove the romantic flair from the theory of “two categories”), but also Agrippa’s book. The latter is confirmed by the discovery of allusions to those parts of the text that were not quoted by Eliseev — allusions present in very significant places of Dostoevsky’s novel that cannot be fully understood without taking this book into account, and vice versa, gaining clarity in its light. Such, for example, is the mention of Abraham before Raskolnikov’s final cordial address to Sonya. The article also suggests that Dostoevsky had read other books by Agrippa as well.