Crime and Punishment

Dostoevsky's final and greatest novel — asks the same theological questions but across three brothers embodying faith, reason, and instinct; Ivan's 'Grand Inquisitor' is the direct philosophical heir to Raskolnikov's theory

The direct precursor — the Underground Man is Raskolnikov before the murder, all theory and no action, the prototype of the pride-paralysis psychological portrait

Meursault's murder and refusal of guilt is Camus's direct response to Raskolnikov — what if the murderer genuinely feels nothing? Camus treats as philosophical what Dostoevsky treats as spiritual catastrophe

What would a truly Christ-like figure look like in the modern world? Prince Myshkin is Dostoevsky's answer — and the answer is tragic, because the world destroys him

Ahab's monomania and Raskolnikov's theory are both portraits of a will exceeding its human container — and both novels use that excess to ask what the universe says in response

The underground narrator, the question of social invisibility and psychological survival, the philosophical monologue as novel structure — Ellison explicitly acknowledged Dostoevsky as a primary influence