«Due sorelle che camminano accanto». I lampi di comicità e le fitte nebbie di Delitto e castigo

In Dostoevsky’s most famous novels, there are several scenes in which the reader feels a strong coexistence of two normally separate styles, the comic and the tragic. When in the dense and murky plot play Dostoevsky’s tragic characters, the comic sometimes bursts in with particular naturalness and the mode of reception is duplicated : in one and the same scene there is a serious reading that can simultaneously turn comic, depending on the perspective from which it is observed. Particularly relevant in this regard are the junctures that Bachtin described as carnivalesque : Katerina Ivanovna’s beating of Marmeladov, the death and funeral of Marmeladov himself, the petit-jeu scene in The Idiot and the fooleries of Fedor Pavlovič Karamazov. In this contribution, an attempt will be made to describe this particularity of Dostoevsky’s style, and to verify its poignancy in one of the works that lends itself most to this type of interpretation, namely Crime and Punishment.