What does the double debut of two Crime and Punishment ballets, the first in St. Petersburg in September 2024 and the second in New York a month later, say about the current perception of Russian high culture in the global arena?

From its origins in the seventeenth-century court of Tsar Alexis of Russia, Russian ballet has historically served the interests of its ruling elite. It should come as no surprise, then, that this September, the St. Petersburg-based ballet company of Boris Eifman premiered a ballet based on the 1866 novel Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky. In his 1880 Pushkin speech, Dostoevsky espoused the “universality” of Russian culture, a sentiment that continues to be advanced by the Russkiy Mir Foundation established under President Putin’s 2007 decree.

In a twist worthy of Dostoevsky’s The Double, however, the same novel served as the source of a second adaptation that premiered a month later in New York. The Crime and Punishment ballet by Helen Pickett and James Bonas was commissioned by American Ballet Theatre (ABT), designated “America’s National Ballet Company” by a 2006 act of Congress. ABT’s ballet made its Washington debut at the Kennedy Center this February. 

The almost concurrent appearance of two Crime and Punishment ballets on the world stage begs the following questions. How does a canonic piece of Russian literature serve an avowedly American company? And what does this cultural synchronicity suggest about the current state of US- Russian relations? 

Just as Russian composer Pyotr Tchaikovsky has become a “cultural casualty” in the ballet world, Russian writers such as Dostoevsky have been reconsidered “in the shadow of the Ukraine war.” While Dostoevsky denotes for many the imperialist reach of Russian soft power, a closer look at the author’s life and times illuminates the continued relevance of his work. 

Dostoevsky’s ancestry, incorporating Lithuanian nobility, Ukrainian Uniate clergy, and Muscovite merchant lines, attests to the “continual strife between conflicting nationalities and creeds” in the Russian empire, according to scholar Joseph Frank. Born in 1821, Dostoevsky came of age in the aftermath of the failed Decembrist uprising of 1825. This abortive revolt resulted in the execution, exile, and martyrdom of aristocratic officers and dissidents who sought to align Russia with a more democratic and liberal Europe. 

The ensuing police state of Nicholas I overshadowed the artistic and intellectual communities in which Dostoevsky first achieved fame as a Realist writer. In the wake of the European revolutions of 1848 and his participation in a secret revolutionary society of the Petrashevsky Circle, Dostoevsky was arrested in 1849 and imprisoned for several months in the notorious Peter and Paul Fortress, where Peter the Great’s own son was tortured to death.  

Following his imprisonment, Dostoevsky was subjected to a mock execution, a form of tsarist sadism to discourage Russian radicalism. His death sentence was commuted at the last moment to four years in a Siberian prison camp and six years in the Russian Army. This period spent in close quarters with peasant-convicts, combined with the patriotic backdrop of the Crimean War, instilled in Dostoevsky the “Russian chauvinism” identified by Slavist Caryl Emerson, and influenced the conception of what would become his most famous work. 

The 1866 publication of Crime and Punishment ensured Dostoevsky’s position in the canon of world literature. Dostoevsky develops the central theme of the novel—whether “extraordinary” individuals have the right to commit violent acts of transgression to achieve greater good—through the schismatic psychology of former student Rodion Raskolnikov. Raskolnikov’s decision to “wade through blood” in the manner of Napoleon drives him to the double murder of an unscrupulous pawnbroker and her devout sister. 

While wandering through the city of St. Petersburg in the delirious aftermath of his crime, Raskolnikov is confronted with two foils. The Westernized Arkady Svidrigailov represents the cultural degradation of the Russian elite, whose lecherous crimes lead to the mortal sin of suicide. The prostitute Sonya Marmeladova embodies the Orthodox ideal of agape and whose noble self-sacrifice serves as a model of redemption.

The Russian production of Crime and Punishment by Eifman foregrounds the divergent paths of Svidrigailov, in a deathly dance with the ghost of a young girl he has defiled, and Sonya, whose body forms a cross above the extended torso of Raskolnikov. These choreographic gestures reveal the deep engagement of Eifman, who previously adapted Dostoevsky’s The Idiot and Brothers Karamazov and has described his work on Crime and Punishment as a thirty-year process.

Eifman’s ballet is immediately recognizable as a work of Dostoevsky in which the city itself is a character. With his production team, Eifman has designed a visual aesthetic that reflects the psychology of the city. Key philosophical components of Dostoevsky’s work are conveyed through visual metaphors. Raskolnikov dons Napoleon’s tricorne hat as he contemplates whether he has the “authority” to commit murder. An abstractly-rendered staircase, Raskolnikov’s path to murder the pawnbroker and her sister, hangs menacingly over the stage.

The American version of Crime and Punishment by Pickett relies on video installations and cryptic surtitles to convey the narrative arc of Dostoevsky’s novel, which has been transplanted to a surreally-Stalinist setting with Socialist Realist costumes and jazzy speakeasies. A scene of Sonya reading the Gospel with Raskolnikov is marred by a prop Bible decorated with a Latin rather than Orthodox cross. This cultural vagueness is compounded by the choreography for Sonya featuring her palms pressed together in European prayer pose rather than crossing herself with three fingers in the Orthodox fashion.

ABT’s casting of Raskolnikov features alternating male and female dancers in the role. In her review of the New York premiere, critic Gia Kourlas characterized this cross-dressed Raskolnikov as “trendy.” Female dancers in male roles have appeared as stage attractions since the eighteenth century, and the “travesty dancer” trend was popularized in the nineteenth century as a means of enticing a new audience to the Paris Opéra. 

In an interview with the New York Times, choreographer Pickett describes looking for dancers “regardless of gender.” While her intention may have been to humanize Raskolnikov, the result of his gender fluidity is limiting. Director Bonas notes that “[h]e’s not lifting anybody,” which diminishes the choreographic impact of the duets between Raskolnikov and Sonya.

Of course, there is a rich tradition of balletic, operatic, and cinematic adaptations that remain true to their literary sources with altered contextual and plot details. The Dostoevsky biographer Frank once told me of his experience in midcentury Paris: upon wandering into a cinema showing an untitled Japanese film, he realized he was watching a retelling of The Idiot set in Japan. According to Frank, Akira Kurosawa’s 1951 film featured cinematic storytelling that didn’t require linguistic or geographic cues to convey the core concepts of Dostoevsky’s novel.

An American production of Crime and Punishment achieves exactly what Dostoevsky suggested in his 1880 glorification of Pushkin: a testament to the “all-humanitarian and all-unifying Russian soul” and to the “great, universal harmony, of the brotherly accord of all nations abiding by the law of Christ’s gospel.” 

Shortly before his creation of Crime and Punishment, Dostoevsky himself gestured to the imperious quality of ballet in his portrayal of Jules Perrot’s Romantic ballet Undine, in which the principal ballerina extends her leg “as if it were the out-stretched hand of Falconet’s monument.” By juxtaposing ballet and Etienne Falconet’s famous equestrian statue of Peter the Great, commissioned by Catherine the Great to legitimate her rule, Dostoevsky suggests the power of ballet as equal parts armament and arbiter of our times. Two new stagings of Crime and Punishment execute both initiatives and augur a new era of US and Russian thinking about culture.

 The opinions expressed in this article are those solely of the author and do not reflect the views of the Kennan Institute.