In Crime and Punishment, both Sonya and Dunya are the embodiments of Christian virtue, which they demonstrate in their self-sacrifice, abasement, and suffering.

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Chelsea Greenlee

Dostoevsky

16 April 2011

Women as Images of Christian Virtue and Sacrifice

During the 19th century, author and philosopher Fyodor Dostoyevsky used his novels as a means to explore human psychology and perception in the troubled political, social, and spiritual context of Imperial Russian society.  While in prison serving a sentence for his membership in the liberal intellectual group the Petrashevsky Circle, Dostoevsky underwent a powerful conversion experience, which greatly strengthened his Christian Orthodox faith and encouraged him to extol the virtues of humility, submission, and suffering.  The incredible impact of Dostoevsky’s conversion experience and the subsequent strengthening of his faith are evident throughout his novels, in which characters, most often women, fully embody these Christian values.  As is characteristic of his writings, Dostoevsky’s novel Crime and Punishment communicates his admiration of Christ-like virtues and his great respect for “proud women,”  using remarkable but tortured female characters, such as Pulcheria, Katerina, Sonya, and Dunya, to illustrate spiritual and social truths.  This is especially true of the novel’s two most prominent female characters, Dunya and Sonya.  In Crime and Punishment, both Sonya and Dunya are the embodiments of Christian virtue, which they demonstrate in their self-sacrifice, abasement, and suffering.  

The idea of sacrifice is foundational to the Christian faith, as the most essential message and defining truth of Christianity is based on Jesus’ sacrifice of Himself for the salvation of humanity.  Both Sonya and Dunya are images of Christ in their willingness to surrender themselves and their most valuable personal possessions for the sake of those they love.  In particular, Sonya, the eldest daughter of the drunken Marmeladov, is remarkable for her denial of her own interests and sense of spiritual morality in order to improve the circumstances of her family.  In the novel, Sonya is described as being childlike of character, naturally embodying qualities of purity, innocence, meekness, and modesty.  Dostoevsky writes of Sonya:

There was, besides, a special characteristic feature of her face and of her whole figure: despite her eighteen years, she looked almost like a little girl, much younger than her age, almost quite like a child, and this sometimes even appeared comically in some of her movements. 

The childlike purity to which Sonya is characteristically predisposed is surrendered as Sonya contravenes the defining elements of her personality to become a prostitute in order to provide a means of financial support for her family.  The sacrifice of her chastity, which is the greatest she can make, is unbearable to her, as she is forced to suffer in the shame of her uncharacteristic sin.  However, by becoming a prostitute, Sonya lives out the self-sacrifice that Jesus commands in John 15:13, when he says, “Greater love has no one than this, than to lay down one’s life for his friends.”  As the verse commands, Sonya dies to her own concerns and values in order to improve the circumstances of those close to her.  

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Just as Sonya is the embodiment of purity, innocence, and chastity, these virtues are also the dearest gifts that she possesses.  When Sonya becomes a prostitute, she sells her virtue, her only possession of value, to men who do not appreciate the gift that they receive.  Much like these unnamed men, Sonya’s stepmother Katerina Ivanovna, who is desperate in her passion and fear for her family, devalues the worth of Sonya’s chastity, commenting, “What’s there to save?  Some treasure!”  Despite Katerina’s derisive statement, which calls into question the significance of the sacrifice that she asks Sonya to make, the surrendering ...

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