plagiarism (Dostoevsky article)

[Valentina Zaitseva]

>An emigre student of mine just handed in a paper on why Raskolnikov committed
>the murder that seems to me to be plagiarized. The beginning is so striking
>I can't believe she wrote it herself. I give it here in the hope that some
>one among you will recognize it and tell me the source. Here it is:
>[I'm giving it in a rough transliteration.] Sibir'. Na shirokoi,pustynnoi
>reke raspolozhen gorod, v kotorom nakhoditsja krepost'. V kreposti ostrog.
>{I'll continue in English.} In the jail for nine monts now has been
>imprisoned ... the prisoner Rodion Raskolnikov. Since the day of the crime
>almost a year and a half has passed. The criminal lay on his bunk and
>thought. He thought about the resurrection of Lazarus, which is spoken
>about in the Gospel. The Gospel lay under his pillow. What brought this
>person here, to Siberia?! A crime!
>Many thanks to anyone who can identify this. Emily Tall
>mllemily at ubvms.cc.buffalo.edu

Dear Emily,
 it looks like the large portion of the strikingly beautiful text belongs
to Dostoevsky himself (I quote the Master in Jessie Coulson's translation):
        (Epilogue.Chapter One)
"SIBERIA, On the bank of a wide remote river stands a town, one of the
administrative centers of Russia; in the town is a fortress, in the
fortress is a prison; in the prison Rodion Raskolnikov, second-class
convict, had been confided for nine month. It was almost eighteen since the
day of the murder."
        Chapter II of the epilogue contains mostly a series of questions
Raskol'nikov is asking himself (like "' What makes what I have done seem to
them so monsrous?' he asked himself. The fact that it was a... crime?'"
-Your student summed it up as  "The criminal lay on his bunk and thought."
        The very last page of the Epilogue contains the following:
"There was a New Testament under his pillow. Mechanically he took it out.
It was hers, the very one from which she had read to him the raising of
Lazarus."

        If the rest of the composition was as text-dependant, the crime of
your student is still a crime: omitting quotation marks.

Best, Valentina