If the alleged killer is a latter-day Raskolnikov, the implications are striking.
Recently, Luigi Mangione, who has been charged with the murder of Brian Thompson, appeared in Court ahead of trial. Thompson, the chief executive at United Healthcare—America’s largest health insurer—was fatally shot in Manhattan on December 4th of last year.
As details about the alleged killer—Mangione—have emerged, I noticed parallels between Mangione and Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikov, the protagonist in Fyodor Dostoevky’s famous novel Crime and Punishment. As I re-read and discussed the novel this semester in a CMC history course—Dostoevsky’s Russia, taught by Professor Gary Hamburg—the similarities appeared overwhelming. A few others in my class had the same idea, and this piece is admittedly indebted to similar comparisons made in posts on X (formerly Twitter), Reddit, Quillette, and perhaps most prominently, the New York Times.
Dostoevsky describes Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment as an incredibly intelligent young man—a former student who is also “exceptionally handsome, above the average in height, slim, well-built, with beautiful dark eyes and dark brown hair.” An impoverished Raskolnikov hatches a plan to murder a greedy pawnbroker and steal her wealth. In executing his plan, Raskolnikov ruthlessly axes the elderly woman and also kills her half-sister. The novel centers on Raskolnikov’s psychological torment following the murder and the forces that impelled him to commit the heinous act in the first place.
Beyond physical resemblance, Raskolnikov and Mangione share uncanny similarities. Mangione, also a former student, graduated as valedictorian from a prestigious all-boys secondary school in 2016 before going on to earn a bachelor’s and a master’s degree in engineering at the University of Pennsylvania in 2020. Despite their intelligence, Raskolnikov and Mangione could not function as normal members of society; the former was debilitated by poverty, the latter by a spinal condition called spondylolisthesis. In the years prior to the murders, both grew increasingly isolated—not speaking to essentially anyone for long stretches of time.
The setting of their crimes—1860s St. Petersburg and modern-day New York City—were the largest urban centers of their respective countries. These cities came with all the peculiar vicissitudes of urban life—chief among them, the change in material circumstance one experiences when traveling between the working class and wealthy subsets of the city. Further still, the murders mimic each other: a premeditated, quick, and shocking attack from behind—a fatal blow and shot to the victim’s back.
Raskolnikov’s inner-monologue and Mangione’s manifesto offer perhaps the most striking comparison: that is, the motivation for the crime. Indeed, despite their differences in their personal socioeconomic status, both Raskolnikov and Mangione betray similar attitudes toward their victims. Raskolnikov views the pawnbroker as a “sickly, stupid, ill-natured old woman… a louse… a black-beetle… [who] is doing harm.” In his manifesto, Mangione labels Thompson a “parasite” that “had it coming.” The killers do not view their victims as victims; instead, Raskolnikov and Mangione respectively view the pawnbroker and Thompson as societal leeches who obtain their wealth through the exploitation of others. Moreover, in the novel, Raskolnikov views himself as “a great man” who, because of his intelligence and potential, possesses a moral right to kill the pawnbroker. Where others were constrained by law, Raskolnikov’s “great man” was capable of stepping over moral and legal limitations in order to do what needed to be done. One cannot help but think that Mangione must have (if only for a moment) imagined himself as one of those great men too; such an analysis seems to comport with Mangione’s own declaration that he was “the first to face [the issues of the healthcare system] with such brutal honesty.”
Most reactions to Mangione’s crime on social media—especially amongst younger Americans—remain unconcerned, however, with a nuanced psychological study of the criminal. The motive for Mangione’s actions appears to them quite simple—dissatisfaction with the American healthcare system—and in fact, laudable. A Generation Lab poll found that college students were three times more likely to sympathize with Mangione than Thompson, and an Emerson College poll found that 41 percent of voters aged 18 to 29 thought the murder was “acceptable,” compared to just 40 percent that thought it was “unacceptable.” But if Mangione is indeed a latter-day Raskolnikov, Dostoevsky’s work teaches us that no matter the apparent justification, the only proper way to understand cold-blooded murder is as a moral transgression.
Despite his continual rationalization of the murder, Raskolnikov is wracked by physical illness, paranoia, and subconscious guilt that changes into the seedlings of repentance at the end of the novel. Beyond illustrating Raskolnikov’s psychological state, Dostoevsky uses a series of dream sequences throughout the novel to prove his point. Before Raskolnikov commits the murder, he dreams of himself as a young boy, witnessing a drunk peasant violently kill a lame mare. Upon waking from the dream, Raskolnikov asks himself: “Can it be, that I shall really take an axe, that I shall strike her on the head, split her skull open... that I shall tread in the sticky warm blood, break the lock, steal and tremble; hide, all spattered in the blood... with the axe.... Good God, can it be?” Beneath the trappings of his impressive intellect, Raskolnikov knows deep in his soul that what he is doing is wrong.
Beyond the effects of Raskolnikov’s “great man theory” on himself, the novel’s epilogue warns of the impact that the proliferation of ideas like his—in this case, that individuals are permitted to murder someone based on the latter’s lifestyle—may have on broader society. While in a hard labor camp, Raskolnikov dreams of “a terrible new strange plague” in which “whole villages, whole towns and peoples went mad from the infection.” As a result of infection, “never had men considered themselves so intellectual and so completely in possession of the truth as these sufferers, never had they considered their decisions, their scientific conclusions, their moral convictions so infallible.” Simply put, the plague endowed every individual with their own unique sense of morality; it made them singular judges of “what to consider evil and what good… whom to blame, [and] whom to justify.” As the contagion spread across the globe, the result was war, famine, and destruction.
Upon reading the novel, many readers sympathize with Raskolnikov, often more so than with the pawnbroker. But Dostoevsky subtly gives the reader the tools they need to challenge that natural sympathy. One may immediately associate Raskolnikov’s crimes with his poverty, but such an account fails to explain why Razumikhin, Raskolnikov’s similarly-situated friend, does not succumb to crime. Moreover, one may conclude that the pawnbroker deserved her fate because of the exploitation she is accused of, but perhaps a retelling of the story from her perspective—coupled with Dostoevsky’s analysis of how difficult society was on women in 1860s St. Petersburg—would leave the reader with a different perspective.
Brian Thompson certainly did not share the prevailing view among young people about the proper role of insurance companies in the healthcare system. But by all personal accounts he was a hardworking and modest man from a rural, working-class upbringing; a loving husband who enjoyed spending time with his two kids; and someone who had aspirations of making healthcare more, not less, accessible. Whether or not these accounts are a true reflection of Thompson’s life, however, are ultimately irrelevant in determining Mangione’s guilt. If the presented facts are to be believed, Mangione stepped over moral law and killed a man in cold blood. For that, he has committed a transgression that nobody, regardless of their ideological beliefs, should deem permissible.