Loopy Ears is a short story by a Nobel Prize-winning Russian

Russians

The Russian people are an East Slavic ethnic group native to Russia, speaking the Russian language and primarily living in Russia and neighboring countries....

 author Ivan Bunin which was written in 1917 and gave his postumous 1954 collection its title. The story was first published in the #7 volume of the literary anthology called Slovo (Слово, Word; Moscow, 1917) and remains to this day one of the most talked about Bunin's stories, being, as it was, arguably the first piece of work in the Russian literature with a serial killer as the main character. Mark Aldanov

Mark Aldanov

Mark Aldanov was a Russian emigrant writer, known for his historical novels.Mark Landau was born in Kiev in the family of a rich Jewish industrialist. He graduated the physical-mathematical and law departments of Kiev University. He published serious research papers in chemistry. In 1919 he...

 considered the story to be one of the Bunin's best.

Some scholars regard Loopy Ears as a dark parody on Crime and Punishment and one striking example of Bunin's deep antagonism towards Fyodor Dostoyevsky and the ideas he represented.

Background

Originally Bunin planned to write a large novel about a serial killer, vyrodok (moral degenerate) named Sokolovych, for which the now known text of the story would form a kind of primal factual basis. In the Russian State Archive of Literature and Art

Russian State Archive of Literature and Art

-External links:* * *...

  (ЦГАЛИ) there are several expanded versions of the story, each pointing to directions in which it was supposed to develop into a novel. One of them feature as its obvious turning point Sokolovich's words addressed to a policeman: "In this case I am more of a sufferer than a criminal. Why? This does not concern you in any way".

In another rough draft Sokolovich's family past and socio-psychological aspects of an environment were explored. In it, the murderer, arrested in Vologda

Vologda

Vologda is a city and the administrative, cultural, and scientific center of Vologda Oblast, Russia, located on the Vologda River. The city is a major transport knot of the Northwest of Russia. Vologda is among the Russian cities possessing an especially valuable historical heritage...

a month after the act, asks for a permission to produce a hand-written account of what preceded it and (according to the author) "comes out with something much more cruel and bizarre than might have been expected even taking into account the nature of the atrocity committed".

Crime and Punishment parallels

According to Aleksandr Dolinin, Looped Ears (that's his version of the title's translation) "rewrites" Crime and Punishment, constructing a "recognizable Dostoevskian world of gloomy, oppressive St. Petersburg with its misty streets, demonic slums, seedy taverns and hotels, and then exploding it from within". The story's two characters, the murderer Sokolovich and the prostitute Korolkova, his victim, are "the grim travesties of Raskolnikov and Sonia lacking any redeeming moral aspects of their models". Bunin's down-to-earth treatment of murder and prostitution, argues the critic, is intended to debunk Dostoevsky's melodramatic 'humanization' of the subject. In fact, Sokolovich takes it upon himself to take issue with the author of Crime and Punishment in his monologue, expounding his own philosophy of murder:

External links

• Петлистые уши. The original text. (in Russian)