Raskolnikov through the Looking-Glass: Dostoevsky and Camus's "L'Etranger"

Is Camus's L'Etranger (The Stranger) a kind of palimpsest overlaying Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment? Literature on the question of possible links between the two novels is virtually nonexistent. Carina Gadourek is exceptional in raising the question at all, and she goes so far as to suggest that "En modifiant un peu les evenements et les personnages de Crime et chatiment, Camus pouvait les faire servir dans L'Etranger."l But what do these minor modifications amount to? Carina Gadourek makes one or two interesting points, but she devotes no more than a page-and-a-half to the question and then passes on to other problems, leaving her assertions stranded. No other study of the two works appears to have been made, though essays on Camus not infrequently contain remarks like Germaine Bree's to the effect that Dostoevsky's "universe thoroughly permeated his own" or that "some of Dostoevsky's basic themes are also Camus's."2 There is room for more to be said about the Dostoevsky whose portrait was one of only two that hung in Camus's study3 and about whose work, towards the end of his brief life, he wrote, "J'ai rencontre cette oeuvre a vingt ans et l'ebranlement que j'en ai renu dure encore, apres vingt autres annees" (P, 1879).