In St. Petersburg none of the characters are safe from the evils of the outside world. The homes in Dostoevsky’s novels become places of chaos, violence, and suffering. These places become places of carnivalization. The carnival usually takes place within a public square because it is a community ritual one that must be open to the public. Throughout Dostoevsky novels, however, places such as apartments, hotels, homes, and so on and so forth become carnivalized. Carnival acts such as scandal, crownings and decrownings, and performances come to the forefront in all manner of places. It becomes a communal performance rather than a private one, eliminating the boundaries as all participates are invited to perform. For instance, in Crime and Punishment,…show more content… Similarly, in The Idiot Nastassya Filippovna enters into the scene when her guardian deceives her after he tries to seduce her to being his mistress; Nastassya is then later exits the scene when she is murdered in the house of Rogozhin. The very act of entering and exiting is not liminal but it is the inbetween, the characters inability to act or to decide that makes their journey carnival. Like the characters stuck in the sordid and the perverse they also struggle with morality and societal constructions. As Bakhtin states, “In Dostoevsky, the participants in the act stand on the threshold (on the threshold of life and death, falsehood and truth, sanity and insanity)”(Bakhtin, 147). The psychology of Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment is the in-between. Dostoevsky experiments with moral-psychological dilemmas. It is through these moral dilemmas that create liminal spaces as characters go through a carnivalistic journey to make a decision. Raskolnikov walks around the city of St. Petersburg delusional with the fact that he commits a murder out of the ideology that it would be for the better
