Crime and Punishment

Summary

Can a superior man place himself above the law?

A young student in St. Petersburg believes he can. He is brilliant, proud, and desperately poor. He has a theory: ordinary people must follow rules, but extraordinary people—Napoleon, for instance—have the right to transgress. They can commit crimes if their goals are great enough. The masses exist to serve. The exceptional exist to lead.

To test this theory, he murders an old woman with an axe.

This is Crime and Punishment.

A Cupboard in the Sky

Fyodor Dostoevsky published this novel in 1866, and it remains one of the most devastating psychological studies ever written. It’s not a mystery—we know who commits the murder from the beginning. The real story is what happens inside the murderer’s mind.

Rodion Raskolnikov is twenty-three years old. He lives in a garret so small it’s more cupboard than room, under the roof of a Petersburg tenement. He owes his landlady rent. He has pawned nearly everything he owns. He has stopped attending university. He lies in his tiny room for days, thinking.

His thoughts have led him to a terrible place.

In that sweltering city, among the drunks and prostitutes of the Haymarket district, an old pawnbroker named Alyona Ivanovna lends money at usurious rates. She hoards her wealth while the poor starve. She beats her simple-minded half-sister, Lizaveta. She is, Raskolnikov tells himself, a louse—a creature whose death would benefit humanity.

If he kills her and takes her money, he reasons, he can finish his education, help his family, do great things. One worthless life exchanged for many good ones. It’s simple arithmetic.

But there’s something deeper driving him. Something he barely admits to himself. He wants to know: Am I one of the extraordinary ones? Am I Napoleon? Or am I just another louse?

The Crime

Raskolnikov visits the pawnbroker’s flat to study the layout. He counts the steps from his lodging: seven hundred and thirty. He observes where she keeps her keys, where she hides her strongbox. He makes a plan.

On a July evening, carrying an axe hidden inside his coat, he climbs the dark staircase to her door.

The murder is nothing like he imagined. He is clumsy, panicked. The old woman doesn’t die from the first blow. He has to hit her again and again. Blood is everywhere. And then—catastrophe. Lizaveta, the innocent half-sister, returns unexpectedly. She sees everything. She is too frightened even to raise her hands to defend herself.

Raskolnikov kills her too.

He escapes by luck alone, hiding behind a door while two men argue on the landing below. He makes it home without being seen. He hides the stolen goods under a stone in a courtyard—he never even counts what he’s taken.

And then his real punishment begins.

The Punishment

Raskolnikov falls into a fever that lasts for days. When he wakes, he is a different man—not transformed by guilt, as one might expect, but fractured. He oscillates wildly between states: defiant one moment, terrified the next. He pushes away everyone who cares about him—his friend Razumikhin, his devoted mother, his proud sister Dunya—while simultaneously dropping hints that invite suspicion.

He is called to the police station for an unpaid debt and faints at the mention of the murder. He returns to the crime scene and rings the doorbell, asking the workers renovating the flat about the blood. He argues philosophy with a police investigator, Porfiry, who clearly suspects him but has no proof.

Porfiry is Raskolnikov’s perfect foil: sharp, ironic, patient. He doesn’t accuse directly. He chats, philosophizes, implies. He lets Raskolnikov understand that he is being watched, that it is only a matter of time. The tension between them is unbearable because Raskolnikov wants to confess and cannot.

“You won’t run away,” Porfiry tells him. “You have nowhere to run.”

Sonya

Into Raskolnikov’s self-made hell comes an unlikely savior: Sonya Marmeladov, the daughter of a drunk he meets in a tavern.

Sonya has been forced into prostitution to support her family—her alcoholic father, her consumptive stepmother, her hungry half-siblings. She carries a yellow ticket identifying her trade. She has sacrificed everything, including her soul, for people who cannot help her in return.

By Raskolnikov’s logic, Sonya should be weak. She has let herself be crushed by circumstances. She follows rules that destroy her. And yet there is something in her that his theory cannot explain—a strength that comes not from transgression but from submission. She reads him the story of Lazarus rising from the dead. She believes in resurrection. She believes in him.

Raskolnikov confesses his crime to Sonya. He expects her to recoil, but she doesn’t. She pities him. She tells him he must confess publicly, bow down and kiss the earth he has defiled, and accept suffering as the path to redemption.

“Take up the cross,” she says.

The Confession

Raskolnikov’s theory collapses under its own weight. He has proven nothing by the murder except his own weakness. He is not Napoleon. He could not step over the obstacle without looking back. He cannot even spend the money he stole.

“I wanted to find out whether I was a louse like everyone else, or a man,” he tells Sonya. “Could I transgress, or couldn’t I? Was I a trembling creature, or had I the right?”

“But you murdered!” Sonya cries. “You took a life!”

“I only killed a louse,” he answers. “A useless, harmful louse.”

“A human being—a louse!”

And there it is. His theory required him to see the old woman as something less than human. But she wasn’t. She was a person. And Lizaveta—gentle, simple Lizaveta—was undeniably innocent. Raskolnikov’s rationalization was a lie he told himself, and somewhere in his psyche, he always knew it.

He goes to the crossroads, as Sonya told him, and kneels in the dirt. Then he walks to the police station and confesses.

Siberia

Raskolnikov is sentenced to eight years of hard labor in Siberia. Sonya follows him there, finding work as a seamstress, visiting him when permitted. For a long time, he is still proud, still isolated. He doesn’t repent in any conventional sense. He thinks his crime was merely a mistake, a miscalculation about his own nature.

Then something shifts. One evening, sitting by a river, watching the nomads in the distant steppe, Raskolnikov feels a sudden joy. He finds Sonya’s New Testament under his pillow—the same one from which she read him Lazarus. He doesn’t open it yet. But he knows he will.

The novel ends not with punishment but with possibility. Raskolnikov has seven years of suffering ahead of him. But he has also found something he had lost: the capacity to love, and to be loved. The story of his gradual renewal, Dostoevsky tells us, might be the subject of another tale.

What It Means

Crime and Punishment is Dostoevsky’s assault on the rational, utilitarian philosophy that was sweeping through Russia in the 1860s. The “new men” believed they could calculate good and evil like mathematics. One death plus many benefits equals moral action. Raskolnikov is their logical conclusion—and their condemnation.

But Dostoevsky’s attack is not simple moralizing. He gives Raskolnikov the best arguments. The pawnbroker really is cruel. Poverty really does destroy people. The world really is unjust. Raskolnikov’s theory is seductive precisely because it contains truths.

The horror is that truth is not enough. You cannot reason your way to the right to kill. Human beings are not problems to be solved. The moment you see another person as a “louse,” you have lost something essential—the thing that makes morality possible in the first place.

Sonya represents Dostoevsky’s answer: suffering accepted, not inflicted. She does not argue with Raskolnikov’s theories. She simply lives a different way. She sacrifices herself not to prove a point but because there is no other choice. She loves without calculation.

“It was love that brought you back to life,” Dostoevsky might say. Not reason. Not philosophy. Not the extraordinary man’s will to power. Just a prostitute with a New Testament, kneeling in the dirt beside a murderer, waiting for him to rise.

Why It Lasts

We still produce Raskolnikovs. Every generation has its young men who believe they have solved the riddle of existence, who divide humanity into the sheep and the wolves, who think their superior intellect places them above ordinary morality.

Some of them read Nietzsche. Some of them read Ayn Rand. Some of them write manifestos before committing violence. All of them share Raskolnikov’s fatal error: they cannot imagine themselves as the victim. They cannot see the louse as human.

Dostoevsky saw them coming. He wrote Crime and Punishment not to condemn but to understand—to crawl inside the murderer’s skull and show us how a bright young man talks himself into an axe. And then to show us the way back.

The way is not through reason. The way is through love, suffering, and surrender. The way is Sonya on her knees in the Siberian mud.

Raskolnikov is still kneeling there, in every reader, in every generation. The story is not finished. It is never finished.

It is always just beginning.