A whole complex of Dostoevsky’s motives is revealed in “Confession of a Murderer...”, starting with the title of the story and its Russian atmosphere (the main character is Russian and most of the plot of the story takes place in Russia). The hero Semyon Semyonovich Golubchik was an agent of the Russian police in Paris before the revolution, carrying out the most unseemly assignments - he established connections with Russian political emigrants in order to then hand them over to the III department. He talks about his past baseness over vodka in a Russian Parisian restaurant with gusto bordering on despair. The genre of the socio-philosophical detective story, the very form of the narrative (public self-deprecating confession) indicate that Roth in this story resorts not only to the psychologism of Dostoevsky, but also to the techniques of his poetics.