Robert Louis Stevenson

Markheim Robert Louis Stevenson

Markheim" is a short story by Robert Louis Stevenson, originally prepared for the Pall Mall Gazette in 1884, but published in 1885 in The Broken Shaft: Tales of Mid-Ocean as part of Unwin's Christmas Annual. The story was later published in Stevenson's collection The Merry Men and Other Tales and Fables (1887). The creature in the story could either be an agent of the devil or Markheim's own conscience, writes Stevenson biographer Claire Harmon. In 1884 Stevenson likely read Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment which greatly affected him and, although the story draws on the themes and plot of Dostoyevsky's work, Harman believes the piece to be wholly original in that Stevenson incorporates an element of the supernatural in the story. Like much of Stevenson's other work, the story shows Stevenson's preoccupation with the nature of duality.