In brief
“On an exceptionally hot evening early in July a young man came out of the garret in which he lodged” (Part I, ch. 1). He is Rodion Raskolnikov, a former student, starving in St Petersburg, and by the end of Part I he has killed an old pawnbroker with an axe, along with her half-sister Lizaveta, who walked in at the wrong moment. Five parts and an epilogue remain. There is no mystery about who did it. The suspense is about something odder: what exactly he has done, and whether he will ever be able to say.
The Russian word in the title, prestuplenie, means literally a stepping across. Raskolnikov thought of the crime as a step over a line, on the far side of which he would discover what he was. The book is about the far side. It is a thriller and also a specific polemic with the Russian radicals of the 1860s, and neither fact weakens the other.
The argument
Raskolnikov has a theory, or rather two, and they do not agree. The first is arithmetic. He overhears it from a student in a tavern just as he is brooding on the old woman: “One death, and a hundred lives in exchange—it’s simple arithmetic!” (Part I, ch. 6). The second is the theory of his own article, which Porfiry the investigator digs up: “all men are divided into ‘ordinary’ and ‘extraordinary’”, and the extraordinary, the Napoleons, may step over blood (Part III, ch. 5). A man who believed the first would use the money; a man who believed the second wouldn’t care about the sum.
The act wrecks both. He takes a handful of trinkets, buries them under a stone in a yard without so much as opening the purse (Part II, ch. 2), and never comes back for them. So much for a hundred lives. He faints at the police office at the mention of the murder (Part II, ch. 1), and the man who meant to be Napoleon wanders back to the flat to ring the bell (Part II, ch. 6). And Lizaveta, whom nobody could call a harmful louse, has no place in either theory.
The novel’s great scene is his confession to Sonia (Part V, ch. 4), because he cannot give his reason. He tries poverty, then helping his mother, then “I wanted to become a Napoleon”, then “I’ve only killed a louse”, and she says, simply, “A human being—a louse!” He finally arrives at: “I wanted to have the daring ... and I killed her”, and then at the sentence the novel has been moving towards: “I murdered myself, not her!”
So Dostoevsky’s case against the radicals’ rational egoism is subtler than a sermon. He says the theory is wicked, but he also says it is false as psychology: a person cannot do what it prescribes. Razumihin, the loud friend, gets it right in passing: “To go wrong in one’s own way is better than to go right in someone else’s” (Part III, ch. 1). Porfiry knows it professionally: “the perpetration of a crime is always accompanied by illness”.
The shape of the book
Six parts and an epilogue. The crime closes Part I, and everything after it is consequence. The American critic Edward Wasiolek compared the structure to a “flattened X”: the rational and proud Raskolnikov declines through the first three parts as another man emerges in the last three, with the turn in the middle of the novel. Key episodes recur in mirror-image in each half.
Three long interviews with Porfiry mark the time: over tea and his article (Part III, ch. 5), at the police office, broken off when a painter suddenly walks in and confesses (Part IV, ch. 5, Part IV, ch. 6), and at last in Raskolnikov’s own room, where Porfiry tells him he knows, describes his own crime to him, and suggests he give himself up (Part VI, ch. 2). Around them run the other plots: his sister Dounia’s engagement to the odious Luzhin, the collapse of the Marmeladov family, and Svidrigaïlov, whose pursuit of Dounia ends when she fires at him (Part VI, ch. 5), and whose story ends at dawn with a revolver and a drowsy man in a copper helmet, to whom he explains that he is going “To America” (Part VI, ch. 6).
The epilogue is the book’s most argued-over pages. In Siberia, eight years’ sentence ahead, Raskolnikov is still unrepentant until a plague dream of “microbes” endowed with “intelligence and will” drives men mad with their own certainty; then, one spring morning by a river, he finds himself at Sonia’s feet. Many readers find this too quick. The narrator half agrees, closing with “the story of the gradual renewal of a man”, which he declines to tell. Steven Cassedy’s reading seems right to me: the tragedy is complete without the epilogue, and the Christian story inside it isn’t.
The voice
Dostoevsky first planned a first-person confession. In November 1865 he recast the novel in the third person, and the result is a voice he more or less invented: outside the hero grammatically and inside him in every other way, with sudden shifts into Svidrigaïlov or Luzhin when he needs them. Time speeds up and sticks in ways that readers of the period took for carelessness. Joseph Frank saw in them something closer to what James and Conrad would do later.
The prose is fevered because the city is. The heat, the dust and the stench near the Hay Market in the opening pages are not setting so much as symptoms. Raskolnikov’s garret is “more like a cupboard than a room” (Part I, ch. 1). Everyone talks too much and to the wrong person. Marmeladov buttonholes a stranger in a bar to deliver his vision of the Last Judgment, in which God will call: “Come forth ye drunkards, come forth, ye weak ones, come forth, ye children of shame!” (Part I, ch. 2). It is a preposterous speech from a man who has drunk his daughter’s earnings, and it is the most truly Christian thing in the novel.
Porfiry is the voice’s comic triumph. He giggles, interrupts himself and goes “he-he-he” at the worst moments. Columbo’s creators, Levinson and Link, named him as one model for their detective.
The reading of Lazarus
Near the centre of the book (Part IV, ch. 4), Raskolnikov goes to Sonia’s room at the tailor Kapernaumov’s. He is cruel to her, tells her that her stepmother and the children are doomed, then bows down and kisses her foot. When she recoils he says: “I did not bow down to you, I bowed down to all the suffering of humanity.” Then he makes her read the raising of Lazarus aloud from a New Testament that, we learn, Lizaveta brought her. She does it in a shaking voice, angry and unwilling. “The candle-end was flickering out in the battered candlestick,” and it lights “the murderer and the harlot who had so strangely been reading together the eternal book”.
This chapter was contested from the start. The editors of The Russian Messenger objected to the version he first sent, and he had to rewrite it more circumspectly in 1866. The original does not survive. What we have still scandalised Nabokov, who told his students it was the “flaw” that “causes the whole edifice to crumble ethically and esthetically”: to set a killer beside a girl who has merely sold herself, he said, is a rhetorical trick.
He is right about the trick and wrong, I think, about the scene. The sentence is overripe. But the action around it is not, since Sonia’s fury at being made to perform her faith for a sneering stranger is what makes the reading work. And the book she holds came from the woman he killed, as he has just heard from her own mouth. That does more than the candle.
The people
Raskolnikov
Proud, generous, starving, and intermittently decent: he gives away his last coins to the Marmeladovs on impulse and then regrets it. His name is built on raskol, a split or schism. As a boy in a dream he kisses a mare flogged to death by a drunken peasant (Part I, ch. 5), and he wakes from it swearing he will not do it, a day before he does. He is a killer who at seven could not bear cruelty.
Sonia
Sofya Marmeladova, eighteen, on the “yellow ticket” so that her stepmother’s children can eat. She can seem like a symbol, but in scene she is frightened and stubborn, and it is she who gives the instruction that ends the novel: “kiss the earth which you have defiled” (Part V, ch. 4). He does it in the Hay Market, “kissed that filthy earth”, and is laughed at for a drunk (Part VI, ch. 8).
Porfiry Petrovitch
A detective with no evidence and no need of it. He tells Raskolnikov “Be the sun and all will see you” (Part VI, ch. 2) while advising him to get a lighter sentence, and it is impossible to say how much of his sympathy is technique.
Svidrigaïlov
Raskolnikov’s double: a man who has actually stepped over the line, more than once, and found nothing there. He imagines eternity as “one little room, like a bath house in the country, black and grimy and spiders in every corner” (Part IV, ch. 1). He is generous and vile by turns, and he shows what the theory means if you can live it.
Razumihin and Dounia
The novel’s two sane people, who marry. Dounia’s readiness to sell herself to Luzhin for her brother is the same trade Sonia makes, as Raskolnikov notices with rage (Part I, ch. 4).
Luzhin and the Marmeladovs
Luzhin is the theory with its manners on: “love yourself before all men, for everything in the world rests on self-interest” (Part II, ch. 5), and he plants a hundred-rouble note on Sonia to discredit Raskolnikov (Part V, ch. 3). Katerina Ivanovna, Marmeladov’s consumptive widow, spends her last on a funeral dinner to insist on her rank (Part V, ch. 2) and dies raving in the street with her children dancing for coins (Part V, ch. 5).
How it was made
Dostoevsky’s brother Mikhail had died in 1864, leaving the family and debts to him; his journal had failed; he was gambling in Germany. In September 1865, broke, he wrote to Mikhail Katkov, editor of the conservative Russian Messenger and an old enemy in print, offering a story about a young man in the grip of half-baked ideas in the air. It grew into the novel, which ran through 1866 in the same journal as the opening of War and Peace.
The first version was a first-person account. He told a friend he had burned it; Frank shows that he kept and used a good deal of it. Meanwhile he had signed a contract with the publisher Stellovsky to deliver a new novel by 1 November 1866 or forfeit the rights to his works for nine years. He dictated The Gambler in a few weeks to a young stenographer, Anna Snitkina, and married her the next year.
The crime had sources. In 1865 the newspapers carried the trial of Gerasim Chistov, a religious schismatic, who killed two women with an axe in Moscow; the French murderer and poet Pierre François Lacenaire, whose case Dostoevsky knew, is another likely source. The ideas came from the radical press and the circle around Chernyshevsky’s What Is to Be Done? (1863), which Dostoevsky had already attacked in Notes from Underground.
Readers and critics
It was the literary sensation of 1866, on the testimony of Nikolay Strakhov. The left took offence. Grigory Yeliseyev demanded to know when any Russian student had ever murdered for robbery. The critic Dmitry Pisarev, much subtler, praised the novel but read Raskolnikov as a product of poverty, which the book goes out of its way to deny. Tolstoy made an interesting use of him: the murder, he wrote, was decided not at the moment of the axe but much earlier, by minute changes of consciousness, and the blow only discharged a cartridge already loaded. It remains the best short account of Parts I and II.
Bakhtin’s study of Dostoevsky’s poetics (1929, revised 1963) made the novel’s many voices central to modern theory. Frank’s biography corrected the older image of Dostoevsky as a careless genius.
Afterlives
There have been more than thirty film versions. Josef von Sternberg directed Peter Lorre in the American film of 1935; Lev Kulidzhanov made the long Soviet version; and Aki Kaurismäki’s first feature, set in Helsinki (1983), turned it into a dry study of indifference.
The more interesting descendants argue with it. Robert Bresson’s Pickpocket (1959) moves the superior man to the Paris Métro and keeps the ending. Woody Allen’s Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989) and Match Point (2005), whose hero is seen reading the novel, ask the unpleasant question Dostoevsky did not: what if the killer simply feels fine?
How to read it
- Consider the translation. Garnett’s is complete and free, but it irons out the different ways people talk. Oliver Ready (Penguin, 2014) is the liveliest modern version; Jessie Coulson (Oxford, 1953), David McDuff (1991), Pevear and Volokhonsky (1992) and Michael Katz (2017) are the others to know.
- Do not trust his explanations. Every reason he gives is real and insufficient. Keep a count of them through Part V, ch. 4.
- Follow the names. The carter in the dream, Mikolka, and the painter who confesses, Nikolay, bear forms of one name.
- Keep Lizaveta in mind. Raskolnikov hardly thinks of her again. Notice when the book does.
- Judge the epilogue last. Finish it, then reread the end of Part VI, and decide which ending you believe.
Read next
- Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground (1864). The attack on rational egoism as a monologue, two years before the novel.
- Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov (1880). The same question, whether all is lawful, asked of a family and a whole town.
- Alexander Pushkin, “The Queen of Spades” (1834). A cold young man with a Napoleonic profile frightens an old woman to death for money; Raskolnikov’s direct ancestor.
- Honoré de Balzac, Père Goriot (1835). Paris, a poor student, and an arch-criminal proposing that a small murder can be justified by a large career.
- Albert Camus, The Stranger (1942). A killing with no theory at all, and a trial that convicts the man for something else.