Moral Conflicts in Fydor Dostoyevsky's Crime and PunishmentFydor Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment has been acclaimed as the greatest literary work of the Western Hemisphere. Crime and Punishment was written in pre-communist Russia under the Tsar. Dostoevsky's writings show a vision of the human mind that is both frightening and frighteningly real. Its main character, around which all other characters are introduced, is Rodion Romanovitch Raskolnikov. Raskolnikov kills an old pawnbroker for seemingly no reason. His sister and mother move to St. Petersburg following his sister's engagement to a man with whom Raskolnikov was extremely unhappy. Raskolnikov suffers severe mental trauma and becomes ill after the murder. The reader is not sure why Raskolnikov killed the woman, in fact it seems that Raskolnikov himself did not know. He is surrounded by friends and family and draws other characters to him during his illness. He befriends a woman, Sofya Seymonavitch, who prostitutes herself to support her mother and drunken father. As the police close in on his trail, Raskolnikov faces serious threats to his sister from her two suitors, one of whom tries to rape her and kills himself after finding he is unable to do so. Raskolnikov eventually gives up and entrusts his family to the care of his friend Rauzumihin, who marries Raskolnikov's sister Douina. Dostoevsky exposes the darkest sides of human nature with completely human characters. The tale that Dostoevsky weaves is a murder mystery, with the killer and all the facts of the murder known in the very first pages of the book. How then can it be a murder mystery? The mystery is to find out why Raskolnikov communicates... by paper... and then gives all his money to Marmeledov's family after his death? Who befriends and supports Sofya? Who time and again defends his sister's honor and safety? Can the reader call this man a murderer, shun him, and chase him away, making him the bad guy? Or the reader must be forced to see the suffering Raskolnikov is inflicting on himself, the acceptance that what he did was evil, his need to confess to the world what he had done. Will the reader eventually have to admit that this horrible criminal is human? That Rodion Romanovitch Raskolnikov was neither a brute nor a hero, but one of us? Dostoevsky leaves the reader trying to divide the characters with the sword of moral right and wrong, with the sword pointed directly at himself. Works cited: Dostoevsky, Fyodor. Crime and punishment. Trans. Constance Garnet. New York: Modern Library, 1950.