Crime and Punishment

Exhausted, Raskolnikov¹ sleeps in the bushes and dreams of himself as a small boy watching drunken peasants whip a feeble old nag to death for failing to pull a monstrous load, while he runs sobbing to kiss the dying animal. He wakes renouncing the crime, light with relief.

But crossing the Haymarket, he overhears Lizaveta, the pawnbroker's meek, perpetually pregnant half-sister and servant,¹⁵ arranging to be away the next evening at seven. The old woman¹⁵ will be home alone. The relief vanishes.

Earlier he had overheard a student argue that murdering the useless, malicious crone for the good of thousands would be simple arithmetic. Now coincidence feels like fate pushing him. He returns home like a condemned man, certain everything has been decided.

Stealing an axe from a caretaker's room, Raskolnikov¹ sews a loop inside his coat, carries a fake pledge wrapped to delay the old woman, and climbs to the fourth floor. While Alyona Ivanovna¹⁵ fumbles with the string, he brings the butt down on her skull, again and again, and takes her keys and a stuffed purse from her neck.

Then the unthinkable: Lizaveta, the gentle sister,¹⁵ returns early and stands frozen before her dead kin. He splits her skull with the blade's edge. Nearly trapped when two visitors ring and rattle the hooked door, he survives only because they leave for the caretaker, letting him slip past and hide in a freshly painted empty flat. He staggers home and collapses, the stolen goods forgotten in his pockets.

The next morning a police summons terrifies Raskolnikov,¹ but it concerns only an overdue promissory note owed to his landlady. Relief floods him until the assistant superintendent, the explosive Lieutenant Gunpowder, begins discussing the murder.

Officers casually mention the bodies were found warm, the killer barely escaped. Raskolnikov¹ faints, then recovers, convinced he has betrayed himself. He flees, retrieves the loot he had crammed into a hole behind the wallpaper, and realizes how absurdly he hid it.

Burning with fever, he wanders the city for hours, then buries everything beneath a heavy stone in a deserted courtyard. His sickness deepens into delirium; for days he drifts in and out of consciousness, tended by the cook Nastasya and, increasingly, by a loyal acquaintance.³

Raskolnikov¹ surfaces from delirium to find Razumikhin, his cheerful, indestructibly kind former classmate,³ installed as nurse, buying him clothes with money sent by his mother⁷ and clearing his debts. The doctor Zossimov¹³ hovers, intrigued by the patient's fixation on the murder he keeps overhearing discussed.

When the prim Luzhin⁸ visits to introduce himself, Raskolnikov,¹ raw and contemptuous, provokes a quarrel and orders him out, repudiating the marriage.

That same night his mother⁷ and Dunya⁶ arrive at his door, weeping with joy, but he faints at the sight of them and then coldly demands that Dunya⁶ break with Luzhin.⁸ Razumikhin,³ instantly smitten with Dunya,⁶ takes charge of the bewildered women, swearing to protect them while their loved one behaves like a man possessed.

Escaping his family, Raskolnikov¹ taunts the clerk Zamyotov¹² in a tavern, half-confessing in riddles, then witnesses a crowd around a man crushed by a carriage. It is Marmeladov,⁹ dying. Raskolnikov¹ has him carried home, where Katerina Ivanovna¹⁰ and the children watch him expire after a priest's hurried rites. Sonya² arrives in her gaudy street clothes, and her father⁹ dies begging her forgiveness in her arms.

Raskolnikov¹ presses his remaining twenty roubles into the widow's¹⁰ hands for the funeral, then feels a strange surge of restored life, as if pardoned at the scaffold. Marmeladov's⁹ daughter Polenka chases him down to learn his name and promises to pray for him; he leaves the dead man's house feeling, for one evening, that he can still live.

To recover his pawned watch and ring, Raskolnikov¹ visits the magistrate Porfiry Petrovich,⁴ a plump, watery-eyed investigator with a teasing, womanish manner concealing a razor mind.

Porfiry⁴ has read an article Raskolnikov published months earlier, arguing that extraordinary men, the Napoleons and lawgivers, possess an inner right to step over moral limits and shed blood in pursuit of a new idea, while the ordinary mass must obey. Porfiry⁴ presses him with mock innocence: how does one tell the categories apart, and did the author perhaps count himself among the extraordinary?

Zamyotov¹² listens; Razumikhin³ protests in horror. Raskolnikov¹ defends the theory coolly, sensing a trap closing, suspecting Porfiry⁴ already knows everything yet has no proof, only psychology.

After secretly returning to the murder flat to ring the bell and feel its horror again, Raskolnikov¹ is followed by a hunched tradesman who looks him in the eye and quietly calls him a murderer before vanishing. The accusation shatters him; he collapses into feverish dreams of striking the laughing old woman¹⁵ whose skull will not break.

He wakes to find a stranger watching from his doorway: Svidrigailov, the dissolute landowner⁵ who pursued Dunya,⁶ freshly arrived after his wife Marfa Petrovna's sudden death. Svidrigailov⁵ claims to be haunted by her ghost, professes idle curiosity about Raskolnikov,¹ and offers ten thousand roubles to free Dunya⁶ from the wretched Luzhin⁸ marriage, plus news that Marfa left Dunya⁶ three thousand in her will.

At the family meeting, Luzhin⁸ arrives offended that Raskolnikov¹ was permitted to attend against his written demand. He compounds the insult by slandering Raskolnikov,¹ claiming he gave money to a girl of notorious behavior rather than a grieving widow, and by reminding Dunya⁶ that he stooped to take her despite gossip about her name.

He boasts of preferring a poor wife who will regard her husband as a benefactor. Dunya,⁶ her pride flaring, sees the controlling, vindictive man beneath the polish and orders him out. Pulcheria⁷ turns on him too. Luzhin,⁸ who never imagined the helpless women could escape his power, leaves carrying a furnace of spite, blaming Raskolnikov¹ alone, and privately vowing the broken match can still be repaired.

Raskolnikov¹ seeks out Sonya² in her bleak rented room, drawn and repelled at once. He interrogates her cruelly about her hopeless situation, the looming deaths of Katerina Ivanovna¹⁰ and the children, the prostitution she cannot escape, asking what sustains her. Her answer is God.

He demands she find and read aloud the Gospel passage of Lazarus raised from the tomb; trembling, she obeys, her voice rising in triumph at the miracle, willing him too to believe. He tells her he has abandoned his family and chosen her, that they are both transgressors who have stepped over, and promises that if he comes again he will tell her who killed Lizaveta.¹⁵ Unknown to them, Svidrigailov⁵ listens through the wall.

Summoned again, Raskolnikov¹ endures Porfiry's masterful psychological siege. The magistrate⁴ explains his method: he will not arrest his suspect but let him circle like a moth toward the candle, tormented by uncertainty until he breaks. He hints he possesses a small trace, teases the bell-ringing return to the flat, and promises a surprise behind a locked door.

Just as the pressure peaks and Raskolnikov¹ nearly snaps, the door bursts open and Nikolai, a young house painter who found the dropped jewelry case,¹⁴ falls to his knees and confesses to the murders. Porfiry⁴ is thrown, furious at the interruption, but Raskolnikov,¹ momentarily reprieved, walks out shaken, knowing the confession is false and that the duel is far from over.

At Katerina Ivanovna's¹⁰ chaotic memorial dinner, where the proud, consumptive widow quarrels with the German landlady and humiliates her shabby guests, Luzhin⁸ summons Sonya.² Before witnesses he accuses her of stealing a hundred-rouble note from his room, having earlier given her ten roubles as charity.

The note is found in her pocket; she stands paralyzed as the room turns hostile. But Lebezyatnikov,¹¹ Luzhin's⁸ progressive young roommate, erupts: he saw Luzhin⁸ secretly slip the larger note into Sonya's² pocket as she left.

Raskolnikov¹ then explains the motive aloud, exposing Luzhin's⁸ scheme to disgrace Sonya,² vindicate his slander, and reconcile with the family. Luzhin,⁸ unmasked, retreats with insolent threats, while the enraged landlady evicts the grieving Katerina Ivanovna¹⁰ and her children on the spot.

Returning to Sonya,² Raskolnikov¹ confesses the killings without words at first, until she reads it in his face and recoils, then embraces him, crying that no one on earth is more wretched. He tries to explain: he killed to test whether he was a louse or a man with the right to step over, to dare as Napoleon dared, for himself alone, not to help his mother.⁷

He admits the theory failed because he proved himself ordinary by the very act of asking. Sonya² begs him to go to the crossroads, kiss the earth, and confess aloud to the world, then accept suffering as redemption. He resists, unwilling to call his deed a crime, but she vows to follow him to prison and to Siberia.

Evicted and unhinged, Katerina Ivanovna¹⁰ drags her terrified children into the street, dressing them in rags as performers, forcing them to sing and dance for coins, raving that she will appeal to the governor and the tsar.

She collapses, blood pouring from her consumptive chest, and is carried to Sonya's² room, where she dies refusing a priest, declaring God should forgive her without confession. Svidrigailov⁵ suddenly appears and announces he will pay for the funeral and place all three orphans in good institutions, settling money on each and freeing Sonya.²

Then he turns to Raskolnikov¹ and quietly repeats phrases Raskolnikov¹ spoke to Sonya² about whether Luzhin⁸ should live or die, revealing he overheard the murder confession through the wall.

Porfiry⁴ visits Raskolnikov's¹ room and drops all pretense. He explains how he came to suspect him, how he played his tricks, why he never searched or arrested: the psychology was double-ended, the evidence absent, and Nikolai's¹⁴ false confession, born of a sectarian craving to embrace suffering, muddied everything. But Porfiry⁴ declares plainly that Raskolnikov¹ is the killer.

He offers a deal: confess voluntarily and receive a reduced sentence. More than that, he counsels him almost tenderly to stop reasoning, to give himself directly to life, to seek faith and accept suffering as a great thing, predicting he will not flee but will come of his own accord. He grants him a day or two to decide, even hinting he might choose suicide instead.

Svidrigailov⁵ lures Dunya⁶ to his rooms, locks the door, and offers to save her brother¹ from Siberia in exchange for herself. When she resists, he reveals the full confession and presses closer. Dunya⁶ draws Marfa Petrovna's revolver and fires, grazing his scalp; a second shot misfires. He waits, willing her to kill him, but she throws the weapon down.

Asked whether she could ever love him, she says never. Something breaks in him; he gives her the key and lets her go. That night he settles money on Sonya² and the orphans, visits his teenage fiancee to leave her a fortune, and after a sleepless night of nightmares about a drowned girl and a corrupt child, walks to a watchtower at dawn and shoots himself before a baffled sentry.

Stunned by news of Svidrigailov's⁵ suicide, Raskolnikov¹ says farewell to his mother,⁷ who senses catastrophe, and to Dunya,⁶ who now knows everything and blesses his decision to suffer.

Still defiant, insisting his only fault was failing to endure, he walks to the Haymarket and, remembering Sonya's² command, kneels and kisses the filthy earth before a jeering crowd, the words of confession freezing on his lips. Sonya² follows at a distance in her green shawl.

At the police station he encounters the babbling Lieutenant Gunpowder, learns again of Svidrigailov's⁵ death, and walks out, faltering. Outside he sees Sonya's² anguished face. He turns back, returns to the office, and at last declares plainly that he killed the old pawnbroker and her sister Lizaveta¹⁵ with an axe.