An «Authoritarian Man» as the Main Character of the Novel «Crime and Punishment»

For the first time in the research literature, the author interprets R. Raskolnikov's Psychosphere through the prism of T. Adorno's “authoritarian personality” theory. The article shows that the hero of “Crime and punishment” had the following destructive features: sadomasochism syndrome, distorted paranoid perception of reality, false stereotypical thinking, the tendency to authoritarian submission, and “usurper complex”. T. Adorno describes all of the above features in his bestseller “The study of the authoritarian personality”. Thus, one can call the work of F. M. Dostoevsky a kind of Overture to the anthropological concepts of representatives of the Frankfurt school of critical sociology.