Crime and Punishment

Fyodor Dostoevsky · 1866

Premise

An impoverished former student in St Petersburg murders an old pawnbroker to test his theory that extraordinary men may step over moral law for a greater good; the novel follows not the investigation of the crime so much as its effect on the murderer, and asks whether any idea can justify killing a human being.

This guide discusses the whole plot, including the ending.

The main ideas

A crime can be reasoned into with arithmetic: one death against a hundred lives saved. The reasoning collapses when it meets a real person.
The belief that some people stand above moral law flatters whoever holds it, and destroys them.
Punishment begins inside the criminal, long before the law arrives. Isolation from other people is its form.
Reason without conscience, carried to its end, leads to emptiness and self-destruction.
Redemption comes through suffering, confession and love, not through argument.
Life, not theory, is what finally changes a person.

The arithmetic of murder

Rodion Raskolnikov has left the university and lives in a tiny garret, too poor to continue his studies. His mother writes that his sister Dunya is to marry a prosperous, calculating lawyer, Luzhin, largely to help Rodion, and the thought of her sacrifice torments him.

In a tavern he overhears a student telling an officer that the pawnbroker Alyona Ivanovna is a useless, spiteful old woman whose money could save hundreds of young lives from poverty and vice. Killing her would be "simple arithmetic," the student says: one death, and a hundred lives in exchange. Raskolnikov has been thinking exactly the same thing. Before the murder he dreams of a peasant flogging a mare to death while a crowd watches and laughs, and wakes horrified at what he is planning.

He kills the pawnbroker with an axe, and then, when her half-sister Lizaveta walks in unexpectedly, kills her too: a gentle, harmless woman who had no place in his calculation.

Implication: an argument that makes harming someone seem rational deserves more suspicion, not less. Real situations rarely stay within the terms of the calculation.

The extraordinary man

The detective Porfiry Petrovich has read an article Raskolnikov published months earlier. In it, Raskolnikov divided humanity into the ordinary, who must obey the law, and the extraordinary, who have an inner right to overstep moral obstacles when their ideas require it. Lawgivers and conquerors such as Lycurgus, Solon, Mahomet and Napoleon shed blood, he argued, and were honored for it.

The murder was a test of whether Raskolnikov himself belongs to the second category. When he finally confesses to Sonya, he admits that he did not kill to help his mother or to benefit humanity: he wanted to become a Napoleon. And his collapse after the murder tells him the answer. He calls himself an aesthetic louse, a man who wanted to step over the line and found he could not bear what he had done.

Implication: be wary of any theory that places its holder above the rules that bind others. It is usually a flattering self-description disguised as philosophy.

Punishment before the law

Raskolnikov is not caught for most of the novel. His punishment comes first from within. After the murder he falls into fever and delirium, faints in a police station, gives himself away in half-confessions and cannot bear the company of his mother and sister, who have come to St Petersburg to see him.

The deepest effect is isolation. He feels cut off from everyone, as if by scissors, unable to speak honestly to anyone he loves. He tells Sonya that he did not murder the old woman but himself.

The novel's title names two things, and the second is not mainly the prison sentence. It is the condition of a man who has placed himself outside the human community and finds he cannot live there.

Implication: the cost of a serious wrong is not only external punishment but the loss of honest connection with others, which begins the moment the wrong must be hidden.

Porfiry's method

The investigating magistrate Porfiry Petrovich has no evidence against Raskolnikov, so he works on his mind. In three interviews, he discusses the article, hints at what he knows, provokes and reassures by turns, and lets Raskolnikov's own nervous behavior betray him. He compares a suspect to a moth circling a candle: left at liberty, the guilty man will come to him.

The second interview is interrupted when a house painter, Nikolay, bursts in and falsely confesses to the murders. Porfiry is not deceived. In the third interview, visiting Raskolnikov's room, he tells him plainly that he is the murderer, and urges him to confess and accept his suffering, offering a lighter sentence if he does.

Implication: a person carrying a hidden wrong often reveals it through their own anxiety. Pressure applied patiently, without force, can be more effective than accusation.

Svidrigailov

Svidrigailov, a wealthy landowner who had pursued Dunya when she worked as a governess in his household, arrives in St Petersburg and attaches himself to Raskolnikov. He is the novel's image of what Raskolnikov's theory looks like in practice: a man who has truly stepped over moral limits, who is rumored to have caused deaths, and who lives for his own pleasures without remorse.

He is also haunted. He imagines eternity not as something vast but as a single small room, like a country bathhouse, grimy and full of spiders. After a final attempt to force himself on Dunya fails, when she nearly shoots him and he sees she will never love him, he gives away much of his money, then shoots himself in the street at dawn, telling a watchman he is going to America.

Implication: freedom from conscience does not produce happiness. Followed to its end, it leaves only boredom and emptiness.

Sonya

Sonya Marmeladova, the daughter of a drunken clerk Raskolnikov meets in a tavern, has become a licensed prostitute to support her starving family. When her father is run over by a carriage, Raskolnikov gives the family his last money. Sonya is the person he chooses to confess to.

She embodies the opposite of his theory: self-sacrifice without calculation, and faith. At his request, she reads him the Gospel story of the raising of Lazarus, a man brought back from death. After his confession, she tells him to go to a crossroads, bow down, kiss the earth he has defiled and tell everyone aloud that he is a murderer. He eventually does kneel in the Haymarket and kiss the earth, then goes to the police office and confesses.

Implication: what breaks a destructive line of reasoning is often not a better argument but contact with someone whose goodness the argument cannot account for.

Life instead of theory

Raskolnikov is sentenced to eight years of penal servitude in Siberia. Sonya follows him there. For a long time he remains proud and closed, regretting only that he failed, not what he did; the other prisoners dislike him and love Sonya.

During an illness he dreams of a plague spreading across the world, in which each infected person becomes certain that he alone possesses the truth, and humanity destroys itself in endless conflict. Soon after, sitting with Sonya by the river, he finds himself weeping at her feet, and realizes that he loves her. In the novel's words, life had stepped into the place of theory. The narrator ends by saying that his renewal is the beginning of a new story, which this one does not tell.

Implication: change in a person rarely arrives through argument. It comes from experience and love, often slowly and after long resistance.

Where it falls short

The redemption is told, not shown. The epilogue compresses Raskolnikov's transformation into a few pages and explicitly leaves it as the beginning of another story, which many readers find unconvincing after the detailed psychology that precedes it.
Sonya is more symbol than person. The saintly prostitute who exists to redeem the hero is a stock figure; Vladimir Nabokov ridiculed the novel's sentence describing the murderer and the harlot reading the eternal book together.
The plot leans on coincidence and melodrama. Svidrigailov happens to lodge next door to Sonya and overhears the confession through the wall; Raskolnikov happens to overhear the tavern conversation that mirrors his own plan.

Brave New World — a society that abolishes suffering, set against the novel's claim that suffering can redeem.
American Psycho — a murderer in a world with no conscience left to punish him.