Category: Dostoyevsky

Whenever a mass killing occurs, such as the recent tragedies at the movie theater in Colorado or the Sikh temple in Wisconsin, we get reams of speculation about why the killer did it. Many of the explanations, as I've written here before, consist of amateur or long-distance psychiatric diagnosis, in which people who should know better attempt to diagnose people they have never met. 

Only occasionally do we see something as insightful and thought-provoking as a short post in Britain's The Independent, written by Alex Bryan, a freelance writer and student at the University of York. Bryan argues that we can get some insight into these horrific acts by looking a little further back--to Raskolnikov, the protagonist of Fyodor Dostoyevsky's ...