About the Author

Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky (1821-1881) is the writer most responsible for turning the Russian novel into a vehicle for psychological and philosophical inquiry, and almost every detail of his life feeds directly into Crime and Punishment. He grew up in Moscow as the son of a strict, often violent army doctor who was murdered by his own serfs in 1839 — an early collision with the question of whether one human being can ever be justified in killing another. As a young man in Petersburg he fell in with the Petrashevsky Circle, a group of utopian socialists who met to discuss Fourier, Saint-Simon, and banned French texts; in 1849 the entire group was arrested. Dostoevsky was sentenced to death, marched to a Petersburg parade ground in December, lined up against a stake, and made to wait through a full mock execution before a courier galloped in with the tsar's commutation. He was then sent to four years of katorga — hard labor — in a Siberian prison camp, followed by compulsory military service. He did not return to Petersburg until the late 1850s.

By the time he sat down to write Crime and Punishment in 1865, his life had collapsed in a different way. His first wife Maria and his beloved older brother Mikhail had both died within months of each other in 1864, leaving Dostoevsky with their dependents and with Mikhail's enormous publishing debts. He was a compulsive roulette player and was burning through advances at the casinos of Wiesbaden and Baden-Baden. He wrote the first parts of the novel while broke, grieving, epileptic, and dictating chapters to a young stenographer, Anna Snitkina, whom he would marry in 1867. Every page of Raskolnikov's poverty, fever, and self-loathing was composed by a man living a version of the same conditions.

Detailed Analysis

The Siberian years are the hinge that turns Dostoevsky from the gifted but conventional author of Poor Folk (1846) into the writer of the late masterpieces. In the camp he lived among murderers, thieves, and political prisoners, read the New Testament constantly because it was the only book permitted, and emerged convinced that the radical Western rationalism of his Petrashevsky days was a moral dead end. The conviction hardens across his work: Notes from Underground (1864) is its first sustained attack on the utilitarian premise that human beings can be improved by reasoning them into self-interest, and Crime and Punishment is its dramatic test case. Raskolnikov is, in essence, a younger Dostoevsky given the courage of his old convictions and then forced to live them out — to discover, as the author himself had discovered in Siberia, that an idea which sounds liberating in a Petersburg garret looks very different beside a corpse.

Crime and Punishment is the first of the four great novels of Dostoevsky's mature phase, followed by The Idiot (1869), Demons (1872), and The Brothers Karamazov (1880). Among them it is the most tightly plotted and the most frequently taught for that reason. The thematic preoccupations of the later books are already in place: the inadequacy of reason cut loose from faith, the redemptive power of suffering freely accepted, the suspicion that radical political theory licenses private cruelty. Read alongside Notes from Underground it gives those ideas a body and a courtroom; read alongside The Brothers Karamazov it reads as a first sketch for the novel in which Ivan's "everything is permitted" will be tested at the scale of an entire family. Mikhail Bakhtin's influential reading of Dostoevsky as a "polyphonic" novelist — a writer whose characters are not mouthpieces but independent consciousnesses arguing on equal terms with the author — first becomes clearly true in this book.

Historical Background

Crime and Punishment was serialized in twelve installments of Mikhail Katkov's conservative monthly The Russian Messenger across 1866, the same journal that was running Tolstoy's War and Peace in adjacent issues. Russia in the mid-1860s was a country in violent intellectual ferment. Tsar Alexander II had emancipated the serfs in 1861, freeing roughly twenty-three million people from legal bondage but binding them to crippling redemption payments and pushing huge numbers of impoverished peasants into cities like Petersburg, where they crowded into the slums Dostoevsky describes around the Haymarket. The reforms had encouraged a generation of radical youth — the so-called nihilists — who took their cues from Nikolai Chernyshevsky's didactic novel What Is to Be Done? (1863) and from the firebrand critic Dmitry Pisarev, and who argued that traditional morality, religion, and even art were worn-out superstitions that a properly rational human being could simply step over. In April 1866, while Dostoevsky was writing the early Parts, a former student named Dmitry Karakozov shot at the tsar in a Petersburg park. The country was already arguing about whether radical theory produced radical violence; the novel walked into that argument carrying a hatchet.

Dostoevsky drew on a thick web of immediate sources. The "extraordinary man" theory Raskolnikov publishes in the Periodical Review and defends to Porfiry is a near-direct response to Napoleon III's Histoire de Jules César, published in French in 1865 and instantly translated into Russian, which argued that great men of history operate by their own moral code in the service of providence. Dostoevsky also drew on the real Petersburg court reporting of the period — particularly the 1865 case of a Moscow student named Gerasim Chistov who killed two women with an axe during a robbery — and on the city itself, the artificial capital that Peter the Great had ordered built on a Baltic swamp in 1703, with its yellow stuccoed facades, fetid summer canals, and tubercular slums. The novel is set during a real Petersburg heat wave; Raskolnikov's suffocation is meteorological as well as moral.

Detailed Analysis

The novel is best read as Dostoevsky's polemical intervention in the nihilist debate, but it is a vastly more honest one than the conservative position usually allowed. He refuses to caricature the radicals as monsters; Raskolnikov's theory is given the strongest possible articulation, and its appeal to a starving, gifted student living one ruble away from his sister's forced marriage is made painfully comprehensible. What the novel attacks is not the radicals' compassion for the poor — Dostoevsky shares it — but the smuggled premise that a sufficiently intelligent person can rationally license himself to harm a human being for an abstract good. The Lazarus chapter, the Sonia confession, and the Epilogue's trichinae dream are all answers to Chernyshevsky and Pisarev: an attempt to show, from the inside of a brilliant nihilist mind, that Western utilitarianism cut loose from Russian Orthodox Christianity does not produce a New Man but a Svidrigaïlov. Dostoevsky's Christianity is not the official Christianity of the synod; it is a folk-Orthodox vision in which redemption requires kissing the actual earth at an actual crossroads, and in which a Petersburg prostitute can read scripture to a murderer with more authority than any priest.

The reception history maps the argument the novel was already having with itself. The first installments in The Russian Messenger were a sensation; readers wrote in to debate whether Raskolnikov was a hero, a victim, or a warning, and the radical press attacked the book as reactionary slander. By the end of the nineteenth century the novel had become foundational reading across Europe, and its influence runs in two contradictory directions. Friedrich Nietzsche, who called Dostoevsky "the only psychologist from whom I had anything to learn," took up the "extraordinary man" theory without the Christian counterweight and rewrote it as the Übermensch in Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Albert Camus, in The Myth of Sisyphus and The Rebel, treated Raskolnikov as the paradigm case of the modern murderer who kills on principle and discovers that the principle will not hold. Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, Richard Wright's Native Son, and a long line of twentieth-century crime novels — most explicitly Patricia Highsmith's Ripley books and the entire genre of the philosophical thriller — descend from Raskolnikov's garret. The Epilogue has remained the contested ground: Bakhtin and many modern critics regard the religious resolution as a failure of the polyphonic method, while others argue that the novel's logic requires it. The argument is itself a measure of the book's success — a hundred and sixty years on, readers still cannot agree whether Raskolnikov is saved, and that uncertainty is the engine that keeps the novel alive.