Crime and Punishment

• 1. Introduction

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  Crime and Punishment opens with a young man brooding in a tiny rented room in Saint Petersburg, an axe and a theory taking shape in his mind. His name is Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikov, a former law student living in extreme poverty. He has convinced himself of a strange idea floating in the air of 1860s Russia. Certain rare individuals, the benefactors and geniuses of mankind, have the right to step across legal and moral boundaries if those boundaries obstruct a higher goal. Why not kill a wretched and useless old moneylender to relieve human misery? Fyodor Dostoevsky, the Russian author behind this question, was wrestling with debts and grief when he conceived it. The novel he produced is often cited as one of the greatest works of world literature. But how did a planned story or novella swell into a full-length novel? Why does a book called Crime and Punishment care so little for the formal crime and so much for one man's conscience? And what made a third-person narrator able to speak with the intimacy of a confession? The answers run through dirty taverns, a pawnbroker's flat, and a Siberian prison.

• 2. A Story Becomes A Novel

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  In a letter to Mikhail Katkov written in September 1865, Dostoevsky described a young man who yields to certain strange, unfinished ideas yet floating in the air. He was not thinking of a novel at that point. He owed large sums to creditors and was trying to help the family of his brother Mikhail, who had died in early 1864. After appeals elsewhere failed, he turned as a last resort to the publisher Katkov for an advance.

  Katkov's monthly journal, The Russian Messenger, was a prestigious outlet, the same one that carried Ivan Turgenev and Leo Tolstoy. Dostoevsky had been engaged in polemical debates with Katkov in the early 1860s and had never published anything in its pages before. He felt his planned attack on the ideology of radicalism would appeal to the conservative publisher.

  In letters written in November 1865, the conceptual shift arrived: the story had become a novel. The Soviet edition of Dostoevsky's writings reassembled his notebooks into a sequence matching the stages of composition. Scholars distinguish a fragmentary working draft of the novella, the Wiesbaden edition, the Petersburg edition, and a final plan. The Wiesbaden edition concentrates entirely on the moral and psychological reactions after the murder, corresponding to what became part 2 of the finished work.

  Dostoevsky initially considered four first-person plans. They included a memoir written by Raskolnikov, his confession recorded eight days after the murder, his diary begun five days after the murder, and a mixed memoir-diary form. The final version came into being only when, in November 1865, he decided to recast the novel in the third person. Joseph Frank suggests one possibility for abandoning the early version: the protagonist began to develop beyond the boundaries in which he had first been conceived. Frank also notes that Dostoevsky did not, as he had told Wrangel, burn everything he had written earlier.

• 3. The Pressure Of The Deadline

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  Fyodor Stellovsky, a prominent Russian publisher, had imposed extremely harsh conditions on Dostoevsky to deliver another book, The Gambler, at the same time. The two contracts ran in parallel, and the strain was severe. A stenographer named Anna Snitkina, who later became Dostoevsky's wife, was of great help during this difficult task. The first part of Crime and Punishment appeared in the January 1866 issue of The Russian Messenger. The twelve monthly installments ran through the year, and the last appeared in December 1866. The novel was later gathered into a single volume. It was the second of Dostoevsky's full-length novels after his return from ten years of exile in Siberia, and the first great novel of his mature period.

• 4. The Anatomy Of Guilt

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  Once the deed is done, Raskolnikov finds himself wracked with confusion, paranoia, and disgust. His theoretical justifications lose all their power. Despite its title, the novel deals less with the crime and its formal punishment than with this internal struggle, the torments of his own conscience rather than the legal consequences.

  Raskolnikov is 23 years old, described as exceptionally handsome, taller than average, slim and well built, with beautiful dark eyes and dark brown hair. He is cold, apathetic, and antisocial, yet he can be surprisingly warm and compassionate. He commits murder and also acts of impulsive charity. After killing the old pawnbroker Alyona Ivanovna with an axe, he also kills her half-sister Lizaveta, who stumbles upon the scene. He steals only a handful of items and a small purse, leaving much of the wealth untouched.

  His surname carries a buried meaning. The Russian word raskol means a schism or split, and a raskolnik is one who splits or dissents. The word evokes the splitting of the Russian Orthodox Church under Patriarch Nikon. Dostoevsky designed his characters' names this way: Luzhin echoes luzha, a puddle; Razumikhin echoes razum, rationality and intelligence; Lebezyatnikov echoes lebezit, to fawn or cringe.

  The original Russian title, Prestupleniye i nakazaniye, does not map cleanly onto the English. Prestupleniye literally means a stepping across. The physical image of crime as crossing a barrier, and its religious sense of transgression, is lost in translation. It is the same image Raskolnikov uses in his article On Crime, where he argues that certain individuals may step across moral boundaries.

• 5. The Souls Around Him

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  Sonya, born Sofya Semyonovna Marmeladova, becomes the first person to whom Raskolnikov confesses his crime. She is the daughter of Semyon Zakharovich Marmeladov, a drunkard Raskolnikov meets in a tavern, and she has been forced into prostitution to support her family. Self-sacrificial, shy, and innocent, she was also a friend of the murdered Lizaveta, who gave her a cross and a copy of the Gospels. She reads him the story of the raising of Lazarus from the Gospel of John. Her name comes from the Greek for wisdom.

  Razumikhin, Dmitry Prokofyich, is Raskolnikov's loyal friend and a fellow former law student. He jokes that his name is really Vrazumikhin, suggesting to bring someone to their senses. Upright, strong, resourceful, and a little naive, he refuses to credit others' suspicions, nurses Raskolnikov through his delirium, and later marries his sister.

  Dunya, Avdotya Romanovna Raskolnikova, is Raskolnikov's beautiful and strong-willed sister, who works as a governess. She plans to marry the well-off lawyer Luzhin to ease the family's finances and escape her former employer Svidrigailov. Her sacrifice enrages Raskolnikov, who sees in it the same compulsion that drove Sonya. In Petersburg she escapes both men, firing a gun at Svidrigailov and narrowly missing before throwing it aside.

  Svidrigailov, Arkady Ivanovich, is sensual, depraved, and wealthy. He overhears Raskolnikov's confession to Sonya, having resided next door, and uses it to torment both Dunya and Raskolnikov, yet never informs the police. He offers Dunya ten thousand roubles, makes financial arrangements for the Marmeladov children, and gives Sonya three thousand rubles so she can follow Raskolnikov to Siberia. He then commits suicide in a public place. Luzhin, by contrast, represents immorality: he slips a 100-ruble banknote into Sonya's pocket to falsely accuse her of theft, a scheme his roommate Lebezyatnikov witnesses and exposes.

• 6. The Duel With Porfiry

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  Porfiry Petrovich, head of the Investigation Department, drives Raskolnikov toward confession through psychological means rather than direct accusation. He seizes on Raskolnikov's article On Crime, adopting an ironic and insinuating tone designed to confuse and provoke. He never makes a direct charge, even hinting that he has a little surprise waiting behind the partition in his office.

  Mikolka, the house painter, shatters Porfiry's trap. As Raskolnikov's anger reaches fever pitch, a young man bursts in with policemen and loudly confesses to the murders. Driven by the teachings of his Old Believer sect, which holds it supremely virtuous to suffer for another person's crime, Nikolai Dementiev offers himself up. Porfiry does not believe him but is forced to let Raskolnikov go.

  In part 6, Porfiry returns and sincerely apologizes for his earlier behavior. His changed attitude comes from genuine respect for Raskolnikov, not any belief in his innocence. He expresses absolute certainty that Raskolnikov is the murderer and urges him to confess to make it easier. Strangely, Raskolnikov begins to feel alarmed at the thought that Porfiry might think him innocent.

• 7. An Argument Against An Idea

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  Dostoevsky's letter to Katkov reveals his immediate inspiration: a desire to counteract what he regarded as the nefarious consequences of Russian nihilism. He targeted both utilitarianism and rationalism, the ideas that inspired the radicals, continuing a criticism he had begun with Notes from Underground. He attacked a Russian blend of French utopian socialism and Benthamite utilitarianism that had developed under thinkers such as Nikolai Chernyshevsky and became known as rational egoism.

  The radicals refused to recognize themselves in the novel. Dimitri Pisarev ridiculed the notion that Raskolnikov's ideas could be identified with those of the radicals of the time. Joseph Frank writes that Raskolnikov's character incorporates an antinomy between instinctive kindness, sympathy, and pity on one side, and a proud, idealistic egoism perverted into disdain for the submissive herd on the other. Raskolnikov even becomes fascinated with the image of a Napoleonic personality who believes he has a moral right to kill.

  Dostoevsky was among the first to recognize the symbolic possibilities of city life. The critic I. F. I. Evnin called Crime and Punishment the first great Russian novel in which the climactic moments play out in dirty taverns, on the street, in the sordid back rooms of the poor. Donald Fanger described a real city rendered with striking concreteness that is also a city of the mind, crowded, stifling, and parched. Dostoevsky's Petersburg is a city of unrelieved poverty where magnificence has no place.

  Due to the fullness of his confession at a time when another man had already confessed, and his state of mind during the murders, Raskolnikov is sentenced to only eight years of penal servitude. Sonya follows him to Siberia. He is initially hostile, still feeling himself guilty only of weakness, and his redemption and moral regeneration begin only after some time in prison, under Sonya's loving influence.