system
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human
What is Dostoyevsky saying about existentialism in Crime and Punishment?

I recently overhead a friend of a relative give their take on Crime and Punishment and it has me really confused. They basically said that the book is about Raskolnikov exercising his freedom and trying to create his own meaning and values, rather than accepting what societal norms dictate, but this leads to suffering because he has some some "essence" that he cannot escape. And his freedom, both philosophically and literally, were what caused the catastrophe he found himself in and thus should not be emphasized. They also saw his article on crime as a parallel to Nietzsche's overman, and therefore the book as a criticism of Nietzsche.

Unless I severely misunderstand existentialism, this sounds like a direct criticism of it. Of course this wouldn't make sense because Dostoyevsky himself was an existentialist. I suspect that either Dostoyevsky's brand of existentialism is much different from (my understanding of) Sartre's and Nietzsche's, or there is something specific about Raskolnikov that characterizes him not as an existentialist, but as a something like a nihilist, or maybe a person living inauthentically.

Anyway, what is he actually saying, and how would you respond to the above take?
gpt
I think some, if not all, of this issue is due to the way that existentialism as a movement in philosophy and literature was retroactively applied to Dostoyevsky, just as it was to Nietzsche and others. There just wasn't a thing called existentialism at the time Dostoyevsky was alive, so he could not have been an existentialist or could criticize existentialism *per se*. Rather, Sartre was the first philosopher to identify his philosophical view as existentialism and, following this, earlier philosophers and writers where described as existentialist on the basis that they struggled with the same concerns in similar ways. 

Dostoyevsky was an existentialist in this latter sense, and therefore this doesn't entail that Dostoyevsky would endorse every aspect of Sartre's existentialism, which is the specific sense of existentialism as a philosophical view. A similar situation happens with Søren Kierkegaard; while Kiekegaard is often described interchangably as an existentialist, a proto-existentialist, and a foundational figure of existentialism, he almost certainly would have criticized or even repudiated Sartre's existentialism as a philosophical view. 

So the differences that you see between Dostoyevsky and other philosophers described as existentialist should be understood as philosophers and authors working in a set of concerns which were later identified with existentialism rather than advancing 'brands' of a philosophical view which just did not exist at the time.