Crime and Punishment

Overview

Crime and Punishment is five hundred and fifty pages in six parts and an epilogue, serialised through 1866 in a monthly journal while Dostoevsky was writing it, which accounts for the cliffhangers and for the enormous forward pressure. He was in debt, had lost his wife and his brother within months of each other, had a gambling problem, and had signed a contract that would have given a publisher the rights to everything he wrote for nine years if he missed a deadline. He also wrote a second novel, The Gambler, in twenty-six days in the middle of this one to avoid that.

The setting is exact. St Petersburg in the summer heat, the Haymarket district, and Dostoevsky uses real streets and distances, counting the number of steps from Raskolnikov’s room to the pawnbroker’s door.

The narration is what makes it new. It is third person but stays so close to Raskolnikov that the reader shares his delirium, and the effect is disorienting in a way nobody had attempted. Dostoevsky originally drafted it in the first person and changed his mind, and traces of the confession remain.

It is also, which surprises people, extremely funny in places. Porfiry is a comic character. So, horribly, is Marmeladov. The drunken monologue that opens the book is a piece of stand-up.

What happens

The murder. Raskolnikov is twenty-three, has dropped out of university for lack of money, lives in a garret he describes as a cupboard, and has not eaten properly in days. He has been turning over a plan for a month and cannot decide whether he will do it. In a tavern he meets Marmeladov, a drunk who has lost his job and whose daughter Sonya has gone on the streets to feed the family, and who delivers a long, self-lacerating speech about it.

A letter arrives from his mother: his sister Dunya is to marry Luzhin, a pompous and mean-spirited lawyer, and the marriage is plainly a transaction to support Raskolnikov’s studies. That decides him.

He kills the pawnbroker with an axe, and then her mild sister Lizaveta comes in unexpectedly and he kills her too. He takes a purse and some trinkets, hides them under a stone, and never looks at them again.

The unravelling. The rest of the novel is the consequence, and almost nothing about it is legal. Raskolnikov collapses into fever for days. He is summoned to the police station over an unpaid debt, hears the murder being discussed, and faints. He returns to the flat and rings the doorbell to hear the sound again. He confesses to his friend Razumikhin in everything but words, repeatedly.

The antagonist is Porfiry Petrovich, the examining magistrate, and their three conversations are the finest thing in the book. Porfiry has no evidence and never pretends otherwise. He has read an article Raskolnikov published on crime, in which the argument appears: that people divide into the ordinary, who must live under the law, and the extraordinary, who have an inner right to step over it if their idea requires it, and that Napoleon is the type. Porfiry raises it as a point of intellectual interest, teases, digresses, goes silent, and lets the suspect understand that he is completely understood. Then he waits.

Sonya. Meanwhile Raskolnikov attaches himself to Sonya Marmeladova, who has a yellow ticket, supports a consumptive stepmother and three children, and believes. He makes her read him the raising of Lazarus from her New Testament, which she does, shaking. He eventually tells her what he did, and her response is not horror but the instruction to go to the crossroads, kiss the earth he has defiled, and say aloud that he is a murderer.

The others. Two figures shadow the argument. Luzhin, Dunya’s suitor, holds a theory of rational self-interest that turns out to mean framing Sonya for theft. Svidrigailov is the more disturbing: a man who has done everything Raskolnikov’s theory permits, feels nothing at all, is haunted by literal ghosts, and speaks of eternity as possibly being a village bathhouse full of spiders. He is what the theory produces when it is carried through without agony, and his exit from the novel is one of the bleakest passages Dostoevsky wrote.

The confession. Raskolnikov goes to the station, having realised not that he was wrong but that he was not the kind of man he thought he was. He tells Sonya beforehand that it was not the theory that killed the old woman; he killed himself. He kneels in the square, is laughed at, and goes in and confesses.

The epilogue. Siberia, eight years, and Sonya has followed him. For most of it he is sullen and unrepentant and the other convicts dislike him. Then, in the last pages, something changes, and he weeps and takes her hands and the narrator says the story of his renewal would be another story and this one is finished.

How to read it

Read it fast. It was serialised, it is built to pull, and the fever is better felt at pace than studied.

Read the three Porfiry scenes twice. They are interrogations in which no evidence appears and no accusation is made, and they are the best detective writing in literature partly because the detective’s whole technique is psychological.

Track what Raskolnikov actually regrets. He is tormented from the first hour, and almost none of it is sorrow for the two women. Dostoevsky is precise about this, and it is why the epilogue is so contested.

Watch the doubles. Luzhin is the theory as self-interest, Svidrigailov is the theory without conscience, Razumikhin is the same poverty without the theory, and Sonya is the refusal of it. The argument is conducted by arrangement of characters as much as by speech.

Read the epilogue knowing it is disputed. Many readers find the conversion abrupt and unearned after five hundred pages of unrelenting psychology, and suspect Dostoevsky of supplying the ending his convictions required. Others point out that it is deliberately withheld, described in a paragraph, and explicitly labelled as the beginning of another story.

Pick a translation for what you want. Pevear and Volokhonsky are the most literal and keep the Russian’s roughness. Oliver Ready is faster and catches the comedy. Constance Garnett is free, smooth, and quietly tidies Dostoevsky’s strangeness.

Questions it raises

• Is Raskolnikov’s theory refuted, or only shown to be beyond the strength of the man who held it? He never says it was wrong.
• The punishment begins before anyone suspects him. What is doing the punishing?
• Porfiry could have arrested him and does not. Is his method mercy, technique, or a belief about what confession is for?
• Svidrigailov feels nothing and kills himself; Raskolnikov feels everything and lives. What is the novel claiming about conscience?
• Sonya’s faith is presented as the answer, and she is a prostitute with no education. Is Dostoevsky arguing for belief or for humility?
• Does the epilogue belong? The novel ends twice, and the endings say different things.