Парадокс женского сексуального желания в Преступлении и наказании: к вопросу о женской груди [The Paradox of Female Sexual Desire in Crime and Punishment: On the Question of the Female Breast]

This article examines references to the female breast found in Dostoevsky’s novel Crime and Punishment to reveal the contradictory role of female sexuality in his literary world. We argue that despite feminist inclinations and a personal familiarity with “emancipated love,” Dostoevsky had particular difficulty with issues of women’s sexual desire and female corporeality, associating them with danger. His ambivalence about female sexuality was not simply a reflection of nineteenth-century literary modesty, but a more personal conviction. Indeed, he actively suppressed the bodies and desire of physically attractive women in his work. In Crime and Punishment, for example, both Sonia and Dunia attract male desire, but do not express their own. With few exceptions, the desire that drives Dostoevsky’s plots is exclusively male; as such, it is also forgivable and even obligatory. References to the female breast in his work reveal this deep ambivalence about the female body: now alluring, now menacing, now subject to torture, the breast can also be symbolically maternal or disease-ridden (tubercular). Thus desexualized, it becomes capable of representing the spirit of common humanity that unites Dostoevsky’s personages and that was so important to him.