A Student that Has the Right: The Collective Anti-Raskolnikov in Donna Tartt’s The Secret History

Abstract

The paper focuses on Dostoevsky’s influence in D. Tartt’s novel The Secret History. The author shows how the main plot collisions of Crime and Punishment are inverted in the book of the American writer. The character of the book is the collective antagonist of Raskolnikov who recognizes the right to kill. The Übermensch is portrayed in the novel as the impeccable rationalist Mycroft Holmes. The spiritual force that guides Tartt’s characters on the path of transformation into an Übermensch is the pagan god Dionysus, to whom the students go to kill. The novel shows the self-destruction of a murderer who refused to see a person in his victim. The author’s voice in the novel is designed on the model of Dostoevsky’s poetics, using the reception of strange phrases uttered by the hero for no reason, as it happens during the wake with the family of a murdered student. At this moment, a phrase pops up in Richard’s head by itself: “It was I who killed the old woman and her sister Lizaveta with an axe and robbed her”. This phrase of Raskolnikov is a brief synopsis of the plot of Crime and Punishment. In Donna Tartt’s novel, this phrase expresses the author’s position, the author’s explanation of what is happening in the book: other characters in another world repeat Raskolnikov’s fate, and the author shows what this leads to. Raskolnikov managed to escape by converting to Christ and accepting his human nature. Donna Tartt’s Übermensch could not be saved, because instead of Christ he communicated with Dionysus. Taking communion with Dionysus in the ancient ritual of homophagy, students go to murder. The novel shows the self-destruction of all five murderers who refused to see a person in their victim: suicide (Henry), suicide attempt (Francis), alcohol and drugs up to complete desocialization (Charles), self-punishment in the form of rejection of the joys of life and communication with people (Camilla), loneliness (Richard). Thus, Donna Tartt proves from the opposite the same idea that Dostoevsky expressed in his Orthodox novel: every life is priceless, murder destroys people and the world.