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As texts attesting to the novel's transfiguration into one of the most influential myths of modem culture, revisions of Fedor Dostoevskii's novel Crime and Punishment (1866) into a comics format deserve special attention. On the one hand, the constant reappearance of the novel in visual media reveals the timelessness of the moral dilemmas haunting Dostoevskii's characters, promising a successful reception by audiences and financial rewards for the artists. On the other hand, its reincarnation in the form of comic books (graphic novels), which hardly tend to exhaust the novelistic discourse, signals the completion of a long process of the novel's appropriation by popular culture and proves its status as a myth in the collective unconscious.1
Ingrained in contemporary culture through its high-, middle-, and lowbrow manifestations, the Crime and Punishment narrative repeatedly demonstrates its ubiquity. While the unflagging devotion of film and theatre directors to Dostoevskii's novel stimulates the public's interest in this text,2 allusions to it sprinkled across various cultural strata ensure the continued emergence of versions that strip the literary discourse of everything irrelevant to what the adapters perceive to be its mythical core. It might be useful to pinpoint some of these conceptions of the novel in popular awareness before focusing on the Crime and Punishment comics themselves.
The subtitle of the Batman comic Two-Face: Crime and Punishment (1995) exemplifies an enduring tendency to fleetingly employ the novel's title as a marketing device that confers greater respectability on popular-culture artifacts. In such instances the literary inscription - today an inseparable idiomatic expression utterly detached from the literary text and applicable to various cultural phenomena - functions as a mythical signifier. Woody Allen, in his film Match Point (2006), likewise reasserts the mythical reputation of the Russian novel by including it in his narrative to challenge the long-honoured axiom that crime inevitably entails punishment. Not only does its protagonist actually read this nineteenth-century novel and a critical companion to it(!), but also the director incorporates the Raskolnikov crime in his 'happy-ending' scenario as the celluloid character murders his pregnant lover and her next-door neighbour, to preserve his marriage and prosperity. In using Dostoevskii's novel as a subtext for events occurring in contemporary British society, Allen doubly validates its mythological status.
The adoption of...