Crime and Punishment — themes & analysis

Raskolnikov's theory is laid out in an article he published six months before the novel begins, in a small periodical. Porfiry has read it. So has Razumikhin. The argument: the mass of humanity is "ordinary." A small minority is "extraordinary" — Lycurgus, Solon, Mahomet, Napoleon. These men have the right, even the duty, to step over ordinary moral law in pursuit of a new word, a new founding. They shed blood, and history vindicates them. The category is historical, not moral: extraordinary men are those whose transgressions are validated by what they go on to build.

The murder is meant to be a test. If Raskolnikov can kill the pawnbroker — by his calculation a louse — and use her money to fund his own emergence as an extraordinary man, the theory is confirmed. He has earned the right. If he flinches, he is ordinary. The theory, as a theory, is internally consistent. Dostoevsky takes it seriously enough to give Raskolnikov real arguments. Porfiry, when he engages with it, does not laugh.

What the novel does is not refute the theory on paper. On paper, it holds. What the novel does is show what living inside the theory does to the person who produced it. Raskolnikov hits the pawnbroker once with the blunt edge of the axe and she drops. Her sister Lizaveta walks in by accident; he kills her too, with no theory to cover it. He grabs a few items from a small box, misses most of the money, runs. Within hours he is feverish. Within a week he has almost confessed to a clerk at the police station. The body the theory was supposed to liberate is in revolt.

Dostoevsky's argument is structural. The theory says: extraordinary men step over the moral law. The novel says: there is no extraordinary man, only the man who has stepped over the moral law and is now finding out what that costs. By the time Raskolnikov stands in the police office saying "It was I who killed," the theory is not refuted; it is forgotten. The act has produced its own answer, and the answer is not philosophical. It is what his hands did to him.

Where to follow it: Part 3 Chapter 3 (the article), Part 4 Chapter 5 (Porfiry on the article), Part 6 Chapter 2 (the last interview).

Earlier novelists had described guilt. Dostoevsky is the first to render it as a continuous bodily event. Raskolnikov returns from the murder shaking. He hides the stolen items under wallpaper that does not quite cover them. He falls into a fever that lasts four days. He hallucinates. When the police summons arrives the next morning — for an unrelated debt — he is convinced they have come for him; he nearly faints in the office. The reader sees, sentence by sentence, a mind that cannot hold the experiment its owner has authorized.

The novel pays close attention to what the body does without permission. Raskolnikov sweats during interviews when he has no reason to. He stops eating. He cannot bear to be touched. He lashes out at his mother and sister within hours of their arrival in Petersburg, then turns and embraces them, then turns again. He goes back, twice, to the apartment where the murder happened, rings the bell, asks the workmen about the bloodstains on the floor — acts he cannot afterwards explain. He half-confesses to Zametov in a tavern, watching to see if the clerk will believe him; when Zametov nearly does, Raskolnikov laughs and takes it back. The body is trying to discharge what the mind will not surrender.

Porfiry understands this. The whole strategy of the magistrate is built on the assumption that Raskolnikov's body will deliver him without forcing. He does not need a confession in the legal sense. He needs to keep the suspect in the room, talking, sweating, until the suspect produces it himself. The three set-piece interviews are exercises in deliberately allowing time to do what evidence cannot. Porfiry circles. He laughs. He makes small talk. He waits.

Dostoevsky's argument, in this thread, is that the moral law is not a rule we choose to keep or not. It is built into us, and breaking it does not free us, it sickens us. The novel does not argue this in propositions. It shows it in symptoms. By the end Raskolnikov's body has become almost unintelligible to him — alternately enraged, paralyzed, exalted, exhausted — and the reader has watched, in slow motion, what a conscience looks like when it is being refused. It is the great achievement of the book and the reason every later psychological novel is downstream of this one.

Where to follow it: Part 2 Chapter 1 (the morning after), Part 2 Chapter 7 (the half-confession to Zametov), Part 3 Chapter 5 (the first Porfiry interview).

The novel's moral center is not a philosopher but a meek nineteen-year-old who has gone on the streets to keep her drunkard father's starving children fed. Sonya Marmeladov is the daughter of the clerk Marmeladov whom Raskolnikov meets in the tavern in Part 1 Chapter 2. Sonya is what that man's ruin produced. She is also, Dostoevsky insists, an actual person — poor, humiliated, occasionally exasperated, by no means a saint in her own eyes.

Raskolnikov goes to her room for the first time in Part 4 Chapter 4. He has come, he tells himself, because she is the only person in Petersburg more degraded than he is. He asks her cruel questions about whether she will go on selling herself, about what will happen to Katerina Ivanovna's children. He asks her to read to him from the New Testament — the raising of Lazarus from John 11. She reads it: "Jesus said unto her, I am the resurrection and the life." She is reading to a murderer who has not yet told her he is one. The scene is among the most charged Dostoevsky ever wrote.

When Raskolnikov returns and confesses, Sonya does not flinch. She does not condemn him. She does not argue. 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 offers to follow him to Siberia. She does follow him. The novel is exact about her motives. She is not interested in his theory. She is interested in him.

Dostoevsky's claim is that the descent into self-destruction is not reversed by argument but by a particular kind of love that meets the sufferer where he has fallen. Sonya does not refute Raskolnikov; she outlasts him. She sits at the prison gate while he is inside the fortress. She is the one face he can bear to see. In the epilogue, on the bank of the Siberian river, what finally cracks open in him is not a thought. It is the sight of her hand. The novel is willing to call this Christian love and to claim that nothing else in the book has been able to do what it does.

Where to follow it: Part 4 Chapter 4 (the reading of Lazarus), Part 5 Chapter 4 (the confession to Sonya), Epilogue Chapter 2 (the riverbank).

The first sentence of the novel locates everything. "On an exceptionally hot evening early in July a young man came out of the garret in which he lodged in S. Place." The whole book is in the heat of that sentence. Petersburg in July is unbearable: the air is dead, the dust everywhere, the bars stink, the staircases full of drunks, the courtyards airless. Raskolnikov's room is "more like a cupboard than a room" — six paces by something less, the ceiling so low he stoops. He has not eaten in two days. He has not paid rent in months. The theory was produced inside this room.

Dostoevsky knew the streets. He had walked them as a debtor, an epileptic, a recently released convict. He puts the addresses in. He counts the steps. Raskolnikov, going to the rehearsal in Part 1 Chapter 1, has counted seven hundred and thirty steps from his front gate to the pawnbroker's door. The novel is full of stairs — staircases climbed in panic, descended in exhaustion. The Marmeladov flat at the top of a tenement. The pawnbroker's apartment up four flights. Sonya's room three storeys up by the canal. The body of the novel is a body climbing.

The streets do not improve the mind. Drunks lurch past; women throw themselves into canals; a horse is beaten to death in a dream; a girl is followed by a predator across the boulevard while Raskolnikov tries to get her into a cab and away. The city is a generator of cruelty and small kindnesses, mostly cruelty. It pushes its inhabitants past the point at which they can think clearly. The theory of the extraordinary man is partly the product of a brain too long in a room too small in a heat too great with too little food. The novel knows this and does not let it excuse the murder.

Petersburg is also a moral location. By the 1860s it was the capital of an empire trying, badly, to modernize, and its slums housed the population the modernization had ruined. Raskolnikov is one of those people. So are Marmeladov, Katerina Ivanovna, Sonya. The novel is the inside of a city that produces theories like Raskolnikov's because the alternative — sitting still and starving — is no longer bearable. The heat is not metaphor. It is the condition under which the moral imagination breaks.

Where to follow it: Part 1 Chapter 1 (the heat, the rehearsal), Part 1 Chapter 2 (Marmeladov in the tavern), Part 1 Chapter 5 (the dream of the horse).

Dostoevsky builds his novels by doubling. The doubles in this one are Pyotr Petrovich Luzhin, Dunya's calculating fiancé, and Arkady Svidrigailov, the rich landowner pursuing her. Both are versions of what Raskolnikov's theory looks like when it is not being held by Raskolnikov.

Luzhin is the theory as bourgeois ideology. He has read the new economic literature; he believes rational self-interest advances the common good. He selects Dunya on the explicit calculation that she will be eternally grateful and therefore controllable. He explains this aloud on his second visit, and seems puzzled when she throws him out. In Part 5 he tries to ruin Sonya by planting a hundred-rouble note in her pocket and accusing her of theft, to discredit Raskolnikov in front of his mother and sister. He is the theory as a man who does not need an axe — only an account book and the willingness to harm anyone whose harm his interest requires.

Svidrigailov is the harder mirror. He has lived for years exactly as Raskolnikov's theory predicts an extraordinary man would: he has done what he wanted, with no theory to cover it. He has, almost certainly, killed his wife Marfa Petrovna; he has driven a young servant girl to suicide; he has pursued Dunya across two provinces. He says so himself, with disturbing equanimity. He is also capable of moments of inexplicable generosity — paying for Katerina Ivanovna's children's education, giving a sum to Sonya, sparing Dunya when she points a pistol at him. He is what Raskolnikov has been arguing he has the right to become: a man past good and evil, indifferent. He is also bored, exhausted, increasingly unable to sleep. He goes to a cheap hotel in the rain and shoots himself before dawn.

The novel uses the two doubles to put Raskolnikov in a vise. Luzhin shows him the theory as a respectable career — and shows the reader why we are right to despise it. Svidrigailov shows him the theory consummated, lived without self-deception — and shows that even in the man who has stopped pretending, the only place it ends is the suicide hotel. Raskolnikov is not Luzhin and is not Svidrigailov. By the end of Part 6 he is, with Sonya's help, choosing not to become either. The doubles are how Dostoevsky stages the choice.

Where to follow it: Part 2 Chapter 5 (Luzhin's first visit), Part 4 Chapter 1 (Svidrigailov in the room), Part 6 Chapter 6 (Svidrigailov's last night).