Crime and PunishmentStudy Guide

Rodion Raskolnikov slips out of a coffin-like garret on a suffocating July evening in St. Petersburg. He is a former law student, behind on rent, and half-starved. Isolation has given him a theory: extraordinary people may break moral law for a greater purpose, the way Napoleon did. He counts seven hundred thirty steps to Alyona Ivanovna, the pawnbroker, pawns his father's watch, and asks whether her gentle sister Lizaveta will be home. Weeks earlier in a tavern he overheard a student make the same arithmetic already living in his head: one worthless life against thousands saved. A dream of peasants beating a mare to death almost stops him. Then he sews a loop into his coat, takes an axe, and murders Alyona. Lizaveta walks in with a bundle. She does not raise a hand. The second blow was never in the plan.

He hides the purse and pledges under a stone in a courtyard and never even opens the money. Fever and guilt arrive faster than the police. A letter from home tells him that his sister Dunya is set to marry a man she does not love to save the family, and the news sharpens his shame before he has confessed anything to himself. In a tavern he meets Marmeladov, a ruined clerk who drinks while his daughter Sonya walks the streets to feed the children; when a carriage crushes Marmeladov in the street, Raskolnikov gives the widow the last of his coins. Detective Porfiry Petrovich has already read Raskolnikov's own article on extraordinary men. He does not chase clues so much as conscience, and every conversation becomes a trap for self-deception.

Sonya, forced into prostitution to keep her stepmother's children alive, reads him the raising of Lazarus in a rented room on the canal. A suitor circling Dunya plants a hundred-rouble note on Sonya at a memorial dinner to ruin her. Raskolnikov exposes the trick, walks to Sonya's room, and makes her guess who killed Lizaveta. What have you done to yourself, she asks, and tells him to confess. Porfiry names him in his own room and waits. Svidrigailov, Dunya's former employer, has listened at the door. He is the darker ending of the same theory: a man who does what he wants and calls it freedom. He corners Dunya. She fires a revolver and grazes him. He lets her go, leaves Sonya money for the road to Siberia, and shoots himself at a watchtower in the rain.

Dostoevsky published Crime and Punishment in 1866, writing in bursts while fleeing creditors. The novel has six parts and an epilogue. It is not a whodunit. You know the killer from the first week. The question is whether a mind that can justify murder can also tell the truth. Raskolnikov takes Sonya's wooden peasant cross, kneels in the Hay Market, and kisses the earth. At the police station he says he killed the old pawnbroker and her sister Lizaveta with an axe. The trial is short. Evidence that he once helped a consumptive student and pulled children from a fire, plus the confession itself, cuts the sentence to eight years. Sonya follows him to the camp. Pride keeps him sicker than the fetters. He still calls the crime a blunder and the theory no stranger than others. After Easter, on a riverbank by an alabaster kiln, he falls at Sonya's feet. Life steps into the place of theory. The New Testament she gave him, the book of Lazarus, has waited unopened until now.

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