Crime and Punishment by Feodor Dostoevsky

I had not read any Dostoevsky until two years ago. His reputation intimidated me. I was imagining it would be too dark, and too philosophical, also too long, wanting to read it, knowing I should read it, but also somewhat dreading the assignment. It sounded important, but also depressing and dull. Boy, was I wrong. Or I was right, actually, but in a way that makes none of that matter. It is dark. It is philosophical. It is long. But the darkness is heart-breaking not depressing. My emotions were stirred up not dragged down by the pathos of his characters. The philosophy he introduces is easy to follow and thought-provoking and always tied to the narrative. This novel, and The Brothers Karamazov are page-turning thrillers, anything but dull. And if they are long, well, when a novel is this good, having a lot of it is not a negative.

Dostoevsky began writing Crime and Punishment in 1864, the same year he published Notes from Underground, which explores some of the same themes. He published Crime and Punishment serially in a magazine called The Russian Messenger beginning in January 1866 and completing in December of that year.

The story is of Roskolnikov, a young man, a former university student in St. Petersburg forced to leave the university because of lack of funds, but before he left caught up in the kind of radical thought young people are likely to encounter at a university. The serfs had been freed in 1861. Russia was in the midst of social and political change. Politicial theorists are experimenting with new ways of social organization. The revolutions of 1917 are still 50 years away but the seeds have been planted. Karl Marx, who is never mentioned in the book (although some of his ideas are), had published the Communist Manifesto in 1848. And the specter of Napoleon, defeated at Borodino in 1812, still haunts the Russian soul. Tolstoy was writing War and Peace, published in sections between 1865 and 1869 at the same time Dostoevsky is writing and publishing Crime and Punishment. Both books wrestle with Napolean’s genius mixed with ego and monomania and wonder what it means for the rest of us and human morality.

The question that animates Roskolnikov is whether an extraordinary person, like a Napoleon (who is a character in Tolstoy’s book but only referred to in Dostoevsky’s), should feel bound by the same moral laws that constrain the rest of us. Roskolnikov sees that every creative person must break the current border of the acceptable in order to move society forward. A genius must break even more. It’s a utilitarian, mathematical argument: If someone is capable of changing society in a way that will benefit thousands, or millions of lives, why shouldn’t even murder be acceptable in order to achieve that greater good?

Of course Roskonikov decides that he is such a genius, or at least wants to test if he is. Is he willing to step over the boundaries of mundane society? Couldn’t he do great things if he just had a little seed money to get his programs started? He identifies an old woman, a pawnbroker, Alena Ivanovna. She’s unloved. She has money. She’s cruel to her sister, Lizaveta. And everybody knows that she’s going to leave all her money to a monastery when she dies, what a waste, so Roskolnikov hatches a plot to kill her.

The book is written in six parts, plus an Epilogue. Each part consists of five to eight fairly short chapters. The Epilogue is in two chapters. Dostoevsky employs a third-person, omniscient narrator to describe the action and give us the interior thoughts of his characters. But he keeps a tight focus on Roskolnikov. So seldomly does Dostoevsky recount a scene where Roskolnikov isn’t present that I started to mark them in the text, they startled me so. The action takes place over fifteen days, narrated almost hour by hour, in a hot July and when the sun in St. Petersburg barely sets. Madness and fever are part of the heightened milieu. Roskolnikov commits the murder at the end of Part One, the evening of the third day.

As I was reading, my husband kept asking if I’d gotten to the “punishment” section yet, but the organization isn’t as neat as that. Roskolnikov gets out of the pawnbroker’s apartment without being seen. He had pawned some items himself, so the cops question him, but it isn’t clear, to Roskolnikov or the reader, whether he’s seriously under suspicion. He worries that he’s about to be arrested, wonders why he hasn’t been arrested, but he never is arrested. The book really isn’t a murder mystery, we know who the murderer is, nor does the story track the tightening noose of a master detective’s investigation. It’s not a novel about the aftermath of a crime so much as a novel about a man facing the consequences of a perverse philosophy. Roskolnikov is forced to admit that he is no Napoleon, above the moral law. Then, in the very last lines before the Epilogue, Roskolnikov appears before a police clerk and confesses.

If there must be a literal punishment to fit the two-part title, it’s in the Epilogue where Roskolnikov is sent to hard labor in Siberia. The setting is eighteen months after the murder, nine months after his trial, with seven years of his sentence to come. But Dostoevsky isn’t really interested in Roskolnikov punished but in Roskolnikov redeemed. He has learned the error of a philosophy based on cold rationality divorced from feeling and selfish decisions that deny the humanity of others. Roskolnikov’s realization that he is not extraordinary is the moral awakening that saves him. He is resurrected to a new life. Without trivializing the crime, or the amoral foolishness of his undergraduate philosophy, Dostoevsky allows his character to grow and brings the novel to a close on a hopeful note.

Meanwhile, though, Roskolnikov’s story is just the spine of a complex novel that includes a dozen or so other characters and storylines. I imagine a modern author would have stayed tightly closed on the cat and mouse game between Roskolnikov and the detective, building suspense while waiting to see whether the law or his conscience would get Roskolnikov first. Dostoevsky, though, gives a wide view. Roskolnikov’s widowed mother and sister, Dunya, arrive in town. Dunya has a marriage proposal from a pompous bachelor, Luzhin, who wants Dunya for a dependent trophy (the poorer the better, he says), not a partner or lover. Roskolnikov meets by accident a former civil servant now a drunk, Marmeladov, and gets involved in Marmeladov’s life including befriending his adult daughter, Sonya, who prostitutes herself to support the family, and the man’s second wife, Katerina, dying of tuberculosis, and the three young children from her first husband. (I told you it was dark). There’s also a friend of Roskolnikov’s from his university days, Razumikhin, who just happens to be a relative of the police inspector, Porfiry, and who also falls in love with Roskolnikov’s sister. And there’s a fascinating man named Svidrigaylov who once employed Roskolnikov’s sister as a servant, tried unsuccessfully to seduce her, and now pursues her in St. Petersburg without it being clear whether he’s trying to make amends for his earlier behavior or continuing his plot to ensnare her. Roskolnikov is pressed into all these dramas while also trying to keep his own situation hidden from the police and his friends and family.

Like Joyce’s Ulysses, the novel is constrained in a tight geographic space: one city, and just a few specific streets. From The Hermitage, Roskolnikov’s room is just a few blocks south, the room of the old lady he murders a few blocks from there. Other locations are around that neighborhood or close by on the other side of the Neva river on Vasilevsky Island, or slightly beyond the branch called the Little Neva on Petersburgsky Island. Like Joyce fans in Dublin, I’m told it’s possible to make a Crime and Punishment walking tour with all the sites marked.

I read the Norton Critical Edition published in 1964 with a translation by Jessie Coulsen from 1953. I researched what translation readers recommend and didn’t find any clear consensus, so I simply read the paperback I already had on my bookshelf, probably bought at some used book store years ago. The cover came off as soon as I opened it. But the text was very readable. There were just enough explanatory notes to answer my questions without interrupting the flow. It was also nice to have several critical essays appended at the back along with a list of characters (Russian names are always tricky), a map of St. Petersburg, and a chronology of Dostoevsky’s life – although material like that is now easily available on line.

Here is a chapter by chapter outline I made as I read:

Part One:

day one

1. Roskolnikov visits Alena Invanovna, the pawnbroker in her apartment. He calls this the “rehearsal” for the murder he plans to commit.

2. R. chances upon Marmeladov in a bar and listens to him talk about his family and his daughter, Sonya, who has become a prostitute to support them.

day two

3. R. receives a letter from his mother. His mother writes of his sister, Dunya, and her engagement to Luzhin who promises money but not happiness. And she writes of Dunya’s former employer, Svidrigaylov who tried to have an affair with her. She and Dunya are coming to St. Petersburg.

4. R. defends a drunk girl he meets in a park being stalked by a shady man.

5. R. dreams of himself as a child horrified by a man beating an old cart horse to death.

day three

6. R. remembers the time six weeks earlier when he overheard a young man talking about the justification for committing exactly the crime that R. is thinking about committing. The evening of the murder.

7. The murder. After the old lady is dead R. is surprised by the woman’s sister, Lizaveta, coming into the apartment and kills her as well. He steals a few random items and Alena’s purse. He’s nearly caught but gets away by hiding in an empty apartment being painted.

Part Two

day four

1. R. is summoned to the police station, not about the murder, but about the debt he owes his landlady. He talks to a clerk and to a low-level detective, Zametov. He faints when they start talking about the murder.

2. R. Disposes of the stolen items by burying them under a rock. He never even looks in the purse. He visits his friend Razumikhin. He returns home delirious with fever.

day eight (three days have passed with Roskolnikov unconscious in his bed)

3. R. wakes in his room. Razumikhin attends to him. He has new clothes, bought with money sent from his mother.

4. Raz. and the doctor, Zosimov, discuss the murder in R.’s hearing. One of the painters has been accused because he tried to sell an item that had been pawned. (The item had fallen from R.’s coat as he hid in the empty apartment being painted and the painter had found it when he returned.)

5. Luzhin arrives in R.’s room. R. insults him, having seen him for a louse in the letter from his mother.

6. R. goes for a walk. He talks to Zametov, one of the detectives. He runs into Raz. He visits the scene of the crime.

7. Outside, in the street, R. finds Marmeladov run over by a carriage. He gets Marmeladov back home where he dies. R. gives money to the family (the last of the money from his mother). R. stops at Raz.’s apartment. He goes home and finds his mother and sister waiting for him, just arrived in St. Petersburg.

Part Three

1. R. doesn’t want to see his mother and sister. Raz. walks them to their hotel. He is smitten with Dunya.

day nine

2. Raz. wakes at R.’s apartment. He goes to the ladies’ hotel. They have a letter from Luzhin requesting a meeting that evening and he insists that R. not attend. Raz. takes the ladies back to R. at his apartment.

3. At R.’s apt. they talk of Luzhin’s letter and make plans for that evening. Luzhin wants to force Dunya to choose him and shun her brother. Dunya wants to force a confrontation by requesting R. and Luzhin meet.

4. Sonya arrives at the apartment. She invites R. to attend her father’s funeral the next day. R. and Raz. walk to Porfiry’s apartment. Porfiry is a relative of Raz. and also, it turns out, the lead investigator for the murder. Sonya is followed home by a man who turns out to be her new neighbor ( who turns out to be Svidrigaylov).

5. At Porfiry’s. Zametov is there, too. Porfiry asks R. about an article on crime R. had written six months earlier, published two months ago. The article discusses R.’s theories about extraordinary persons having the right to break social and legal boundaries. It’s clear Porfiry has his eye on R.

6. R. and Raz. walk from Porfiry’s to the hotel to meet R.’s mother and sister, but R. walks off on his own, first. On the street a mysterious stranger accuses him of being a “murderer.” In his apartment he dreams of the murder and wakes to find Svidrigaylov sitting in his room.

Part Four

1. R. and Svidrigaylov talk in R.’s apartment. He offers to give money to Dunya, but his motives aren’t clear. He reveals that in any case his recently deceased wife has left Dunya some money, feeling guilty about having accused her of seducing her husband when actually it was the opposite.

2. R. and his mother and sister, and Raz. talk with Luzhin at the ladies’ hotel room. Dunya, unwilling to break with her brother, sends Luzhin away.

3. With Luzhin and his money foresworn they talk of how to support themselves. Raz. suggests starting a publishing business. R. leaves abruptly, unwilling to dream about a future.

4. R. goes to Sonya’s room. She is a pure-hearted girl, a symbol of Christian redemption through sacrificing oneself for others. R. asks her to read the story of Lazarus to him from the Gospel, even though he’s not a believer. She reveals that she had been friends with Lizaveta. R. says that he knows who killed Lizaveta and he will tell her the next time he sees her. Svidrigaylov, who lives in the next apartment, listens through the door.

day ten

5. R. appears at Inspector Porfiry’s office. Porfiry is taking statements from everyone who knew the pawnbroker. Porfiry toys with him.

6. R. returns to his room. The stranger who called him, “murderer” arrives and is revealed to be a man who saw R. that afternoon when he returned to the scene of the crime, but he has no other reason to be suspicious of him and apologizes for making the accusation.

Part Five

1. Luzhin and his friend, Lebezyatnikov invite Sonya into their rooms in the same house where Katerina Ivanovna (Marmeladov’s wife) and the orphaned children live. Luzhin makes her an offer of financial support which disturbs and confuses her.

2. The funeral dinner in honor of Marmeladov at Katerina’s apartment, paid for with the money R. gave the family.

3. Luzhin arrives at the end of the dinner and accuses Sonya of stealing from him. (he planted a hundred rouble note in her pocket as she left his apartment). He wants to disgrace her and R. so that Dunya will denounce her brother and come back to him. His lie is revealed by Lebezyatnikov and R.

4. R. at Sonya’s room. He confesses his crime to her. He is most upset that by the act of confessing he has proven that he is not an “extraordinary” man, capable of overstepping social norms without guilt. Sonya reacts with compassion and promises to stay with him, seeing how generous he’s been to her.

5. Marmeladov’s wife, Katerina has gone mad from effects of her tuberculosis. She dies in Sonya’s room. Svidrigaylov tells R. that he heard R.s confession by listening at the door.

Part Six

day fourteen (a few days have passed)

1. Raz. speaks with R. in R.s room revealing that the painter has confessed to the murder.

2. Porfiry arrives after Raz. leaves. He accuses R. of the murder, but R. denies it. Porfiry knows the painter is lying simply for drama and attention. Porfiry tells R. that he has a “scrap of proof” but won’t tell him what it is – perhaps it’s a lie just to push R. into confessing. Porfiry tells R. he will arrest him in a day or two, which may also be a lie, hoping he will confess voluntarily.

3. R. finds Svidrigaylov at a tavern.

4. Svidrigaylov drinks and tells R. scandalous stories about his former life. He’s gotten engaged to a young girl. He’s made arrangements to support Sonya’s three orphaned half brothers and sisters at a boarding school. He says nothing about what he will do with his knowledge of R.’s crime. He’s a mass of contradictions.

5. R., worried that Svidrigaylov will go to the police, follows Svidrigaylov back to his rooms but as soon as R. leaves Svidrigaylov goes out again. He meets Dunya on a bridge. They go back to his rooms. Svidrigaylov tells Dunya that R. is a murderer but that he will save R. if Dunya submits to his advances. She resists and tries to shoot him. He relents and lets her go.

6. Svidrigaylov goes out with friends and gets caught in the rain. He comes home. In wet clothes he gives money to Sonya. Then, still wet, he visits the family of the girl he has gotten engaged to and gives them money and says he is going away for awhile. He walks to a shabby hotel and spends the night. His sleep is disturbed by nightmares.

day fifteen

At dawn he gets up, goes out, walks a little, and shoots himself with Dunya’s revolver.

7. That evening, R. goes to his mother’s room, asks her to pray for him and says goodbye. He returns to his room and finds Dunya. He tells her he is going to turn himself in.

8. He goes to Sonya’s room. She blesses him. He wanders to the Haymarket, then to the police station. He learns that Svidrigaylov has committed suicide and therefore can’t accuse him to the police. R. leaves the station but sees Sonya waiting outside so he returns to the police and confesses.

Epilogue

1. The trial. His sentence. Dunya and Raz. marry. R.s mother dies.

2. In prison in Siberia. Sonya has followed him and lives in the village outside the prison. She visits R. and writes letters to Dunya and Raz. Through her kindness and selfless devotion, R. is reborn.