Part 1 · Chapter 1
The rehearsal
An exceptionally hot evening, early July. Raskolnikov sneaks past his landlady on the staircase — he owes her months of rent — and walks the streets of the Hay Market in a state of mental blankness, muttering to himself. He has counted the seven hundred and thirty steps from his front gate to the apartment of Alyona Ivanovna, an old pawnbroker. He is going for what he calls a "rehearsal." He pawns a watch. He notes the layout, the position of the keys on her steel ring, the suspicion in her eyes. He asks casually whether her sister is at home. He leaves shaken and ducks into a basement tavern for a glass of beer.
Part 1 · Chapter 2
Marmeladov
The retired clerk turns out to be Semyon Marmeladov, a former civil servant ruined by drink. He attaches himself to Raskolnikov and tells, in a long set-piece monologue, the entire history of his fall — his consumptive second wife Katerina Ivanovna, the three small children, his dismissal, his daughter Sonya from his first marriage who has gone on the streets to feed them. He has just spent five days drinking the family's last clothes-money. Raskolnikov walks him home and sees the flat — bare, airless, full of children, Katerina Ivanovna at the edge of fury. He leaves a few coins on the windowsill on the way out.
Part 1 · Chapter 3
The letter
Raskolnikov wakes late, hungover and irritable, in his coffin-sized garret. The servant Nastasya brings him cabbage soup and a long letter from his mother in the provinces. The letter takes most of the chapter. Pulcheria Alexandrovna writes warmly and at length about the family's state — Dunya has left the Svidrigailov household after a humiliating scene; she has just become engaged to Pyotr Petrovich Luzhin, a respectable lawyer in Petersburg; the marriage will save the family; mother and sister are coming to Petersburg within days. Raskolnikov reads the letter once, paces the room, and bursts out: "This marriage will not happen."
Part 1 · Chapter 4
The marriage refused
Raskolnikov walks for hours, raging against Luzhin and against Dunya's sacrifice. The parallel to Sonya is unbearable: both women are selling themselves to keep men afloat. On a boulevard he sees a young girl, drunk, dishevelled, swaying, being followed by a fat well-dressed man at a discreet distance. Raskolnikov, on impulse, plants himself between them, calls a policeman, gives the few coins he has for a cab to take her home. The fat man slips away. Raskolnikov watches them go, then turns away in sudden disgust at his own gesture — what does it matter? — and walks on toward the Islands.
Part 1 · Chapter 5
The dream of the horse
Raskolnikov never reaches Razumikhin. He walks past taverns, eats nothing, drinks a glass of vodka that overwhelms him, lies down in the bushes of a copse outside the city and falls asleep. He dreams. He is seven years old, walking with his father past a tavern in his home village. A drunken peasant named Mikolka has loaded a small, broken-down mare beyond what she can pull. He whips her; she cannot move; he beats her with a crowbar; the small Raskolnikov runs to her, kisses her bloody muzzle, screams at his father why? He wakes shaking. The dream has not been about the horse. It has been about the axe.
Part 1 · Chapter 6
The preparation
Raskolnikov spends the next hours preparing, almost mechanically. He sews a noose-shaped loop into the inside of his coat at the armhole, designed to hold an axe. He prepares a fake pledge — a small wooden plank wrapped tightly in metal foil and string, designed to look heavy and silver enough to keep the old woman occupied untying it. He cannot get an axe from the kitchen — Nastasya is washing in the courtyard. At the last minute he finds one in the porter's lodge and slips it under his coat. He climbs the four flights to the apartment. He rings the bell.
Part 1 · Chapter 7
The murder
Alyona Ivanovna lets him in. He hands her the wrapped plank; she turns toward the lamp to untie it; he draws the axe and hits her on the crown with the blunt edge. She drops. He fumbles in her pocket for the keys, opens the chest in the bedroom, grabs a handful of items. The door opens behind him. Lizaveta has come back. She sees her sister on the floor. She does not raise her hand. He kills her with the sharp edge in a single blow. Two visitors nearly catch him at the door. He slips down the stairs into the empty painted apartment on the second floor and from there into the street.
Part 2 · Chapter 1
The morning after
Raskolnikov wakes on his sofa to find a summons from the police bureau. He is convinced they have come for him. He hides the stolen items behind a loose strip of wallpaper, dresses, walks to the office in a state of barely controlled panic. The summons turns out to be about an unpaid IOU his landlady has filed against him. He nearly faints all the same. As he leaves he overhears the chief of police and his assistants discussing yesterday's double murder. He stumbles out of the building and back to his garret, where he hides the stolen items under a stone in a vacant lot near the canal.
Part 2 · Chapter 2
The wandering
Back at his garret Raskolnikov is convinced his room has been searched. He cannot stay in it. He walks all afternoon — back to the murder apartment to ring the bell and ask the workmen about the bloodstains, then on toward the Hay Market, then down to the river. He fantasizes about throwing himself in. He stops outside a great public building on Tuchkov Bridge and watches the spire of the Cathedral. The chapter is the first long set-piece of his unraveling.
Part 2 · Chapter 3
The fever
Raskolnikov falls into a brain fever that lasts four days. He drifts in and out, sometimes raving, sometimes lucid, sometimes asleep. Nastasya feeds him soup. Razumikhin — who has somehow appeared at his bedside without explanation — manages everything. The young doctor Zossimov is brought in. The package of stolen items has been forgotten by Raskolnikov; he wakes, briefly, in horror that he has not hidden them, then realizes he has, then forgets again. The chapter is the first sustained look at his physical disintegration.
Part 2 · Chapter 4
Zossimov and Zametov
Zossimov, Razumikhin, and the young police clerk Zametov gather around Raskolnikov's sofa. Conversation drifts to the double murder; Zametov works at the bureau and has the latest gossip. The painters who had been working downstairs from Alyona Ivanovna have been arrested; one of them, a peasant named Mikolka, is half-confessing. Razumikhin disagrees vehemently with the official theory. Raskolnikov, lying on his sofa, says almost nothing. He listens to every detail.
Part 2 · Chapter 5
Luzhin
Pyotr Petrovich Luzhin walks in. He has come to introduce himself to his future brother-in-law and to deliver, in person, the latest fashionable opinions on rational self-interest. The encounter is a disaster. Luzhin holds forth on the theory that one should love oneself first because all human progress depends on it. Razumikhin and Raskolnikov pull the argument apart. Raskolnikov tells Luzhin, to his face, that on his theory it is permissible to murder. Luzhin leaves furious.
Part 2 · Chapter 6
Out of the garret
Raskolnikov, suddenly restless, gets up and dresses. He puts on the new clothes Razumikhin bought. He walks out into the city. He stops at a tavern, the Crystal Palace, and finds Zametov drinking alone. He sits down. He picks up the conversation about the murder. He plays — half-laughing, half-feverish — at telling Zametov how the murder must have been done; he says aloud, looking Zametov in the eye: "What if I were the one who killed Alyona Ivanovna and Lizaveta?" Zametov stares. The moment hangs. Raskolnikov breaks into a laugh and takes it back. He walks out leaving the police clerk shaken.
Part 2 · Chapter 7
Marmeladov dies
On the way home Raskolnikov comes on a small crowd around an accident: a private carriage with a pair of grey horses has run over a drunk crossing the street. The drunk is Marmeladov. He is bleeding from the chest, dying. Raskolnikov pays for him to be carried to the Marmeladov flat. Katerina Ivanovna, screaming in panic, sends for Sonya. Sonya arrives in her cheap finery — the costume of the streets — and kneels at her father's side. Marmeladov dies asking her forgiveness. Raskolnikov gives Katerina Ivanovna his last twenty roubles to pay for the funeral. He leaves the flat lighter than he has been since the murder. On the stairs, Polenka, Marmeladov's small daughter, runs after him to ask his name, and he tells her: Rodya.
Part 3 · Chapter 1
Mother and sister arrive
Raskolnikov returns from the Marmeladov flat to find his mother and sister in his garret. They have arrived from the provinces, gone first to Razumikhin's lodgings, and been brought here by him. Pulcheria Alexandrovna throws herself on her son weeping. Dunya stands beside the sofa silent. Raskolnikov, exhausted, cannot bear the contact. He pushes them away, says he has not slept, asks them to leave him for the night. Razumikhin — already half in love with Dunya — takes them away to the lodgings he has found for them.
Part 3 · Chapter 2
Razumikhin in the morning
Razumikhin wakes the next morning hung over, troubled, and serious. He has been thinking about Dunya all night. He has fallen in love. He spends the morning making himself presentable, shaving, brushing his clothes — the chapter follows him with comic affection — and then walks to the women's lodgings to escort them to Raskolnikov. He is greeted as a hero. Pulcheria Alexandrovna has been worrying about her son's state; Razumikhin reassures her with the brisk certainty of a man newly in love.
Part 3 · Chapter 3
The article
Mother, sister, Razumikhin, and Zossimov gather at the sofa. Raskolnikov is composed, almost cheerful. Then Razumikhin proposes that they all walk together to visit Porfiry Petrovich, the investigating magistrate — a relative of Razumikhin's — about the watch and the ring Raskolnikov had pawned, which the police are now holding. Raskolnikov agrees. They walk to Porfiry's. Porfiry receives them with elaborate cheerful courtesy. He has read, he says, an article Raskolnikov published months ago in a small periodical — about extraordinary men and the right to step over the moral law. The conversation that follows is the novel's first long set-piece interview.
Part 3 · Chapter 4
Sonya at the door
Back at the garret a soft knock; Sonya is at the door. She has come to invite Raskolnikov, on her stepmother's behalf, to Marmeladov's funeral and the dinner after. Raskolnikov's mother and sister are still there. Sonya is in plain mourning clothes, embarrassed, almost unable to speak. Raskolnikov introduces her formally. The two halves of his life meet for the first time. Sonya bows herself out. Raskolnikov walks her down to the courtyard, says he will come tomorrow night.
Part 3 · Chapter 5
The workman
Late that night, alone in the garret, Raskolnikov is visited by a small, neatly-dressed workman — a tradesman from the building where the murder happened. The workman stands in the doorway and says, plainly: "Murderer." He stands there a moment more. Then he turns and walks down the stairs without another word. Raskolnikov, alone again, falls into a half-dream in which he is back in Alyona Ivanovna's apartment, hitting her with the axe over and over, and she is laughing at him. He wakes shouting.
Part 3 · Chapter 6
Svidrigailov walks in
Svidrigailov has come to find Raskolnikov on his own initiative. He has heard about the brother of the woman he has been pursuing. He sits in the garret and talks — about his dead wife Marfa Petrovna, who he says appears to him; about Dunya; about his desire to see her. He offers, with disarming frankness, a sum of ten thousand roubles to her on the occasion of her marriage to Luzhin, with no strings attached. He admits, as if it were a casual fact, that he has loved her. Raskolnikov listens to him with growing horror. Here is the theory walking. Here is the man who never bothered to talk himself into anything.
Part 4 · Chapter 1
Svidrigailov leaves
Svidrigailov stays a little longer, talking. The conversation drifts strangely — eternity is "a small smoky room with spiders in the corners," he says; Marfa Petrovna appears to him in the form of his old wife. He asks Raskolnikov to deliver his offer to Dunya. Then he leaves. Raskolnikov, with Razumikhin, walks to the women's lodgings. The plan is to break the engagement to Luzhin in front of all parties. Luzhin is expected at eight o'clock that evening.
Part 4 · Chapter 2
Luzhin thrown out
Luzhin arrives. He is in a foul temper from the moment he enters; he has been steeling himself for a difficult evening. He demands that Raskolnikov leave the room. Dunya refuses. Luzhin lectures her on what he has done for the family. Dunya — proud, calm, angry — replies that she will never marry a man who treats her family as he has. He insists; she refuses; she returns the engagement ring. Luzhin, blustering, walks out swearing revenge. The marriage is over. Pulcheria Alexandrovna sits down weeping, with relief and terror at once.
Part 4 · Chapter 3
The break
Within the hour Raskolnikov tells his family he must leave. He cannot, he says, be with them now; he will come back tomorrow. He embraces his mother and his sister. The embrace is so heavy with finality that Dunya, after he has gone, says aloud to her mother: "He doesn't love us." Razumikhin runs after Raskolnikov on the stairs and looks him in the face. He understands, in a single look, more than Pulcheria Alexandrovna has understood in three days. He stops asking questions. He goes back upstairs to look after the women.
Part 4 · Chapter 4
The reading of Lazarus
Raskolnikov goes to Sonya's room. It is in an old green building on the canal — a long, irregular space with three windows and almost no furniture. He asks her about her family. He asks her, cruelly, what will happen to Polenka if Katerina Ivanovna dies. He demands she answer. He notices on her chest of drawers a New Testament and asks where it came from. Lizaveta, she says. He asks her to read him the chapter on the raising of Lazarus. She reads it. She is reading to a murderer who has not told her he is one.
Part 4 · Chapter 5
The second Porfiry interview
Raskolnikov, exhausted and inflamed, goes the next morning to Porfiry's office at the bureau. The conversation is the second long set-piece interview. Porfiry plays — wandering, anecdotal, indirect — for nearly an hour. He hints, denies, retracts, hints again. Raskolnikov is on the verge of breaking, sweating, almost shouting. Then a workman is shown in unexpectedly: it is Mikolka, the painter from the apartment downstairs from Alyona Ivanovna, who throws himself on the floor and confesses to the murder. Porfiry is visibly thrown. The interview ends inconclusively. Raskolnikov walks out half-stunned.
Part 4 · Chapter 6
After the interview
Raskolnikov's memory of the rest of the day, the chapter says, was always afterwards a single long fugue. He remembers the workman — the same one who had said "Murderer" to him — appearing in the doorway of the bureau and bowing to him almost humbly, as if to apologize for the accusation: a final twist in the game Porfiry has been running. He walks out, walks home, walks to his mother's lodging, walks to Sonya's, walks back. He cannot say what he is doing. The day ends with him on a bench by the canal.
Part 5 · Chapter 1
Luzhin nurses his wound
Luzhin sits in his lodgings the morning after his expulsion. He has been working through the humiliation all night. He blames Raskolnikov entirely; the loss of Dunya is, in his mind, his rightful property stolen. He resolves to discredit Raskolnikov in front of mother and sister so completely that they will come back to him on their knees. The means: ruin Sonya, who is connected to Raskolnikov, by framing her for theft. He has invited her to call on him this morning. His flatmate Lebezyatnikov, a young progressive, knows nothing of the plan.
Part 5 · Chapter 2
The funeral dinner
Katerina Ivanovna has spent nearly all of Raskolnikov's twenty roubles on a "respectable" funeral dinner — meant to demonstrate, in front of the slum tenement, that she is still a gentlewoman. The dinner is a disaster. Half the invited guests have not come. The dishes are wrong. Katerina Ivanovna picks fights with her landlady, Amalia Ivanovna. Sonya arrives in tears from her interview with Luzhin. Raskolnikov arrives, watches the dinner from a corner, and waits for whatever is about to happen.
Part 5 · Chapter 3
The frame-up exposed
Luzhin enters the dinner mid-scene. He is calm, official, holding a small notebook. He addresses the room: a hundred-rouble note has been stolen from his pocketbook earlier today; it can only have been taken by a single visitor, Sofya Semyonovna; he asks for the room's permission to have her searched. Sonya, white, does not understand. Katerina Ivanovna screams. The note is found in Sonya's pocket. The room turns on her. Then Lebezyatnikov speaks. He saw Luzhin slip the note into Sonya's pocket as she was leaving. He says so calmly, with witnesses. Raskolnikov adds the explanation of the motive — the broken engagement — and Luzhin's frame collapses publicly. Luzhin walks out. Katerina Ivanovna, ruined and demented with rage, takes the children into the street.
Part 5 · Chapter 4
The confession to Sonya
Raskolnikov, having defended Sonya in front of the dinner, goes with her to her own room. He sits across from her and tells her what he has come to say: he killed the pawnbroker. And the sister. He killed Lizaveta. Sonya, after a moment of complete shock, falls on his neck weeping. She does not condemn him. She tells him to go to the crossroads, kiss the earth he has defiled, bow down to the people, and say aloud: I have killed. Then to take the cross she will give him and accept his suffering. She tells him he has been a child. She offers to follow him to Siberia.
Part 5 · Chapter 5
Katerina Ivanovna in the street
Lebezyatnikov bursts in on the conversation. Katerina Ivanovna, evicted from the flat, has gone fully mad. She has dressed the three small children in scraps of finery, cleaned their faces, taken them into the street, and begun to drag them from corner to corner trying to make them dance and sing for kopecks. She is a former gentlewoman; she will not beg from doorways like a peasant. She is shouting at passers-by, raving about her noble parentage, demanding the governor be summoned. Raskolnikov and Sonya run into the street. They find her on the embankment, blood at her mouth, the children clinging to her. She dies on the floor of Sonya's room a few hours later. Svidrigailov, watching from the doorway, quietly offers to pay for the children's schooling and Katerina Ivanovna's burial.
Part 6 · Chapter 1
The fog
A long, drifting chapter. Raskolnikov has stopped going to Sonya's. He has stopped going to his mother's. He spends days in a fog of inactivity in the garret. Razumikhin appears one afternoon to confront him: Dunya has received a letter — the chapter does not at first say from whom — that has shaken her. He demands Raskolnikov explain himself. Raskolnikov refuses. Razumikhin, hurt, leaves. The reader understands later that the letter is from Svidrigailov; he has begun his own approach to Dunya in parallel.
Part 6 · Chapter 2
The third Porfiry interview
Porfiry receives Raskolnikov in his flat with no flourish. He sits him down. He smokes. He tells him, plainly: I know it was you. The Mikolka confession is false; the man is a religious-minded peasant who is confessing for spiritual reasons. The painters were never serious suspects. The signs against you are many and clear; I have been collecting them for weeks. He says he has no formal evidence sufficient to arrest. He says he has no intention of arresting. He says: come to me of your own accord. Make this easier on yourself, and on your sentence. I will give you a day or two. He says it almost gently. He stands and lets Raskolnikov leave. The third interview is the novel's longest, calmest, and most complete.
Part 6 · Chapter 3
Svidrigailov in the tavern
Raskolnikov finds Svidrigailov at a back table in a tavern near the Hay Market. The conversation is the long companion-piece to the third Porfiry interview — the third interrogation of the novel, except that the interrogator and the interrogated are mirrors. Svidrigailov talks at length about himself: debts, prison, Marfa Petrovna and her ghost, the country estate, the children he is putting in school, a fourteen-year-old he is going to marry. Raskolnikov listens with growing recognition. He asks about Dunya. Svidrigailov says he has written to her proposing one final meeting; he hopes she will come; he will not insist.
Part 6 · Chapter 4
Svidrigailov continues
The conversation continues into a second venue. Svidrigailov reveals plainly what has been hinted at: he has been living in the room next to Sonya's. The wall is thin. He overheard, word for word, Raskolnikov's confession to Sonya in Part 5 Chapter 4. He has Raskolnikov's life in his hands. He says he has no intention of using the information against him. He says it because he has decided to. He says he is more interested, at the moment, in Dunya. The chapter ends with Svidrigailov leaving the tavern alone and Raskolnikov, after a moment, following him.
Part 6 · Chapter 5
Dunya in Svidrigailov's rooms
Svidrigailov walks home. Dunya, having received his letter, is waiting outside his lodgings. He brings her in and locks the door. He tells her what he has — Raskolnikov's life in his hands — and what he wants. Come with him to America. Dunya draws a small revolver from inside her coat. He smiles. He walks toward her. She fires; the bullet grazes his head. She fires again; the gun misfires. He stops. He says: shoot. She lowers the gun and drops it. She walks past him out of the apartment. He picks the gun up, puts it on the table, and stands at the window watching her go.
Part 6 · Chapter 6
Svidrigailov's last night
Svidrigailov walks the streets after Dunya leaves. He visits Sonya and gives her three thousand-rouble notes — for Katerina Ivanovna's children, for herself, for whatever may come. He visits his fourteen-year-old fiancée's family and gives them fifteen thousand. He takes a cheap room by a fire-tower. He cannot sleep. He dreams of Marfa Petrovna; of a five-year-old girl he finds in a corridor and brings into bed, whose face changes while he watches. He wakes. He walks out into the rain at dawn. He stops at the corner where a guard is on duty. He says: I am going to America. He puts the revolver to his temple and pulls the trigger.
Part 6 · Chapter 7
Goodbye to mother and sister
Raskolnikov, having spent the night walking, goes in the early evening to his mother's lodgings. He kneels in front of Pulcheria Alexandrovna and asks her to bless him whatever happens. She does, weeping, without understanding. He embraces her for a long moment. He goes from there to his sister. Dunya is waiting. She has heard from Sonya, indirectly, what her brother has done. She has just come from Svidrigailov's rooms. They speak for an hour. She does not condemn him. She tells him to confess. He agrees. He embraces her. He walks out of the lodgings toward Sonya's, and from there to the police bureau.
Part 6 · Chapter 8
The police office
Raskolnikov goes to Sonya's. She gives him the small wooden cross. He kneels in Hay Square as she has told him and kisses the earth, but cannot bring himself to say the words aloud. He walks to the bureau. On the staircase, hearing news of Svidrigailov's suicide, he nearly turns back. In the courtyard he sees Sonya at the gate. He climbs the stairs again, goes into the office, and says, in a voice that is barely his own: "It was I who killed the old woman with the axe and her sister Lizaveta." The official record is taken. The novel's plot is, at last, over.
Epilogue · Chapter 1
Siberia, the trial
Eight months between confession and trial. Raskolnikov pleads guilty without qualification. The court, citing mitigating circumstances brought by Razumikhin, sentences him to eight years of penal servitude. Pulcheria Alexandrovna, never told the full truth, declines for months; she dies in the second month of her son's sentence, raving, kissing his picture. Dunya marries Razumikhin in a quiet ceremony; they plan to move to Siberia in a year or two. Sonya goes immediately. She finds work as a seamstress in the Siberian town near the prison. Raskolnikov, in the prison, is sullen, withdrawn, and does not yet love her.
Epilogue · Chapter 2
The riverbank
Raskolnikov falls ill in the prison hospital during Easter week. He has a long fever. He dreams that a plague has come from Asia, an infection that makes everyone who catches it certain that they alone possess the truth — the world tears itself apart in disagreement until almost no one is left. He recovers. He learns Sonya has been ill too — has not visited the prison for several weeks. One morning at work-detail by the river, he sits on a log on the bank. Sonya appears beside him. He looks at her hand. He takes it. He weeps. He kneels at her feet and embraces her knees. The novel says, simply: he was resurrected. Under his pillow in the prison barracks is the New Testament Sonya gave him. He has not yet opened it. He will.