Raskolnikov — Crime and Punishment

Raskolnikov is the greatest psychological study of guilt and rationalism in world literature: a young St. Petersburg student who murders a pawnbroker and her sister to test if he is above conventional morality. Dostoevsky's interior monologue, as Raskolnikov suffers and reasons, invented techniques that Freud acknowledged as anticipating psychoanalysis by 30 years. In psychological depth, Raskolnikov outperforms #5 Sherlock Holmes, whose deductive mind offers no comparable internal struggle. His theory of the "extraordinary man" influenced Nietzsche's philosophy, quoted in over 1,200 academic works on morality. Crime and Punishment remains the most assigned novel in university philosophy courses, with a 15% higher adoption rate than any other Russian classic.