Crime and Punishment

About this book

Crime and Punishment is a novel by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, first published in installments in 1866. It follows a poor former student in Saint Petersburg who kills a pawnbroker and then has to live with what he has done. Unlike most detective fiction, the book tells you who the murderer is in the opening chapters. The suspense comes from watching him unravel, and from the question of whether, and how, he will be caught or confess.

The book has stayed in print because it treats a murder as a problem of the mind rather than a puzzle of clues. Dostoyevsky wrote it after his own years in a Siberian prison camp, and his interest in how people justify terrible acts to themselves runs through every chapter. It is often listed among the most influential novels of the nineteenth century, and it remains one of the most common entry points into Russian literature for English-speaking readers.

The story

Rodion Raskolnikov has dropped out of university and lives in a cramped rented room in Saint Petersburg, behind on his rent and short of food. He has been turning over a theory: that a small number of extraordinary people are entitled to step over ordinary moral rules if their aims are great enough. To test the idea, and to solve his money troubles, he plans the murder of an elderly pawnbroker.

The killing goes wrong almost at once. What follows is less an investigation than a slow pursuit. A shrewd examining magistrate, Porfiry Petrovich, circles Raskolnikov in a series of conversations that are more unsettling than any interrogation. Meanwhile Raskolnikov’s mother and sister arrive in the city, his sister’s unpleasant suitor tries to buy his way into the family, and Raskolnikov meets Sonya, the daughter of a ruined clerk, whose quiet faith becomes the counterweight to his theory.

Themes and historical context

Dostoyevsky was arrested in 1849 for belonging to a circle of young radicals, subjected to a staged execution, and sent to a labor camp in Omsk for four years. He came back from Siberia with a deep suspicion of abstract ideologies and a conviction that suffering and faith were the only roads to moral recovery. Crime and Punishment is the first of the major novels in which he worked these views out at length.

The Saint Petersburg of the novel is a city of tenements, taverns, and heat. The 1860s were a period of rapid social change in Russia: serfdom had been abolished in 1861, and new theories of utilitarianism and rational self-interest were circulating among educated young people. Raskolnikov’s idea of the “extraordinary man” is a distorted version of those currents, and the novel can be read as Dostoyevsky’s argument against them.

The book’s themes include guilt as a physical as well as a mental state, the contrast between pride and humility, the role of confession, and the ways poverty narrows people’s choices. The title itself sets out the structure: the crime occupies the first part, and the punishment, most of it self-inflicted, takes up the rest.

Who should read it

This is a long novel of around 200,000 words, divided into six parts and an epilogue, and the names will take some getting used to (each character has a first name, a patronymic, and often a nickname). The pacing is faster than its reputation suggests, with long dialogue scenes and several set pieces that read like a thriller. Readers new to Russian fiction may want to keep a character list handy for the first hundred pages. It rewards patience, but it does not require any background knowledge.

Edition notes

This Project Gutenberg edition presents Constance Garnett’s English translation, first published in 1914. Garnett translated most of the major Russian novelists into English in the early twentieth century, and her versions were the standard ones for decades. Later translators have taken different approaches to Dostoyevsky’s rough, hurried style, but Garnett’s remains readable and complete. Names in this text follow the spellings she used.