Crime and Punishment

Next morning a letter arrives from his mother, Pulkheria Alexandrovna, a widow on a tiny pension in the provinces. It is long, loving and devastating. His sister, Dunya, was working as a governess for a landowner named Svidrigailov, who pestered her with advances. His wife, Marfa Petrovna, blamed Dunya and sent her home in disgrace in a peasant’s cart, then learned the truth and went round the town clearing her name. Now there is good news, or so the letter insists: Dunya is engaged to Pyotr Petrovich Luzhin, a prosperous lawyer of forty-five who has let it be known that he wanted a girl without a dowry who has known hardship, since a wife should owe everything to her husband. He may even help Rodya with his career. Mother and daughter are coming to Petersburg.

Raskolnikov sees through it at once. His sister is selling herself to a smug, calculating man to rescue him, exactly as Sonya sold herself for her family. He storms through the streets, tries to rescue a drunk girl from a predatory dandy, and falls asleep in the bushes. He dreams that he is a small boy again, watching a mob of drunken peasants flog a skinny old mare to death with whips and a crowbar while he runs to kiss her bleeding face. He wakes in a sweat and swears he will never do the thing he has planned.

Crossing the Haymarket on the way home, he overhears the pawnbroker’s half-sister, Lizaveta, a simple, overworked woman whom the old woman bullies and beats, agreeing to visit some traders the next evening at seven. The old woman will be alone. He feels that fate has decided for him.

The idea itself came weeks before, when he overheard a student in a tavern telling an officer that killing that spiteful old woman and spending her money on good works would be simple arithmetic: one death for a hundred lives. Would the student kill her himself? Of course not. But Raskolnikov had been thinking exactly the same thing.

The next evening he oversleeps, and finds the kitchen axe he meant to take out of reach. By luck he finds another in the empty porter’s lodge. He hangs it from a loop sewn inside his coat, makes up a fake pledge (a piece of wood and a strip of iron, tied up so it will take time to unwrap), and climbs the stairs.

While the old woman fumbles with the string on the parcel, he brings the blunt side of the axe down on her head, again and again. He takes her keys and stuffs a purse and some trinkets into his pockets. Then he hears a sound. Lizaveta has come home early and stands in the doorway, too terrified even to scream, raising her hand like a child. He kills her too, with the blade.

He has left the door unlocked; he fastens it just as two visitors come up the stairs, find it hooked from inside, and go off for the porter. In that minute Raskolnikov slips out, hides in an empty flat being painted on the floor below (the two decorators have just run out into the yard), and gets home unseen. He returns the axe and falls on his sofa like a dead man.

In the morning the police summon him. He is certain they know; in fact it is about an unpaid IOU to his landlady. But the officers start chatting about the murders, and he faints. Raskolnikov hurries home, takes the purse and trinkets, and buries them under a stone in a courtyard without even looking in the purse. Then he collapses into a delirium that lasts four days.

He wakes to find his friend Razumikhin, a big, noisy, generous student, nursing him, with a doctor, Zossimov, and a young police clerk, Zamyotov, dropping in. They talk about the murders. One of the house painters, Nikolai, has been arrested after pawning a case of gold earrings that came from the murdered woman’s flat. Then Luzhin calls, stiff and condescending, and lectures them on the new ‘economic truth’: if each man looks after his own coat, society ends up with more whole coats. Raskolnikov retorts that by his logic people may be killed, and throws him out.

Then he slips out into the city, half mad. In a tavern he plays a dangerous game with Zamyotov, describing exactly how he would have hidden the loot, then leans in and asks: what if it was I who murdered the old woman and Lizaveta? Zamyotov decides he is ill. Raskolnikov goes back to the scene, finds workmen redecorating the flat, rings the bell again and again to hear the sound, and asks about the blood.

That night, in the street, he comes upon a crowd round a man who has been run down by a carriage. It is Marmeladov. Raskolnikov has him carried home and he dies in Sonya’s arms, asking her forgiveness. Raskolnikov gives his widow twenty roubles, nearly all that is left of the money his mother has just sent him, and Katerina Ivanovna’s small daughter, Polenka, runs after him on the stairs to thank him. He asks her to pray for him. He feels, for the first time in days, alive. When he gets home, his mother and Dunya are waiting in his room. He looks at them and faints.

Razumikhin takes charge of the two women and falls in love with Dunya on the spot: she is tall, proud, quick and beautiful. Raskolnikov treats his family with a strange, cold irritation and orders Dunya to break off her engagement.

Sonya appears, shy and painfully out of place, to invite him to her father’s funeral dinner. Then, on the pretext of asking about the watch he pawned, Raskolnikov goes with Razumikhin to see a distant relative of his, Porfiry Petrovich, the examining magistrate in charge of the murders. Porfiry is about thirty-five, plump, giggling and blinking, and he plays the fool brilliantly. He has read Raskolnikov’s article ‘On Crime’, published months before, and summarizes it with relish. People are divided into ‘ordinary’ and ‘extraordinary’. The ordinary must obey the law; the extraordinary, the Solons, Mahomets and Napoleons, have an inner right to step over it, even over blood, if their idea demands it. Does Raskolnikov believe in God, and in the raising of Lazarus, literally? He does, he says. And how, asks Porfiry innocently, does one tell the two kinds apart? Couldn’t some young man imagine he was a Napoleon and kill an old woman with an axe?

Out in the street, a stranger in a workman’s coat walks up to Raskolnikov, looks him in the face, and says one word: ‘Murderer!’ That night Raskolnikov dreams he is back in the old woman’s flat, striking her with the axe again, and she simply sits there, shaking with silent laughter. He wakes to find a man sitting quietly in his room, watching him. It is Svidrigailov.

Svidrigailov is about fifty, still handsome, polite, bored, and quite unashamed. His wife, Marfa Petrovna, has just died (he admits he struck her twice with a switch shortly before) and left Dunya three thousand roubles. He offers Dunya ten thousand more to be rid of Luzhin, asking nothing in return. He chats about ghosts and debauchery, and wonders whether eternity might be just a little room like a country bath-house, black and grimy, with spiders in every corner. Raskolnikov is appalled, and fascinated.

That evening Luzhin meets the family and overplays his hand. He has already written to them claiming that Rodya gave their money to a girl of notorious behaviour; now he tries to bully Dunya into choosing between him and her brother, and is dismissed. Everyone feels lighter. Then Raskolnikov tells his mother and sister that he must leave them, perhaps for good, and walks out.

He goes to Sonya’s crooked, barn-like room and torments her with questions: won’t little Polenka go the same way she did? Sonya answers that God will not let it be. Suddenly he bows down and kisses her foot, saying that he is bowing to all the suffering of humanity. Then he asks her to read him the story of Lazarus from her New Testament, a copy Lizaveta brought her. Trembling, she reads of the dead man raised after four days in the tomb. He tells her that she too has stepped over a line, and that they must go on together. Tomorrow, he says, he will tell her who killed Lizaveta. Through the thin partition, Svidrigailov, who happens to lodge next door, hears every word.

The next morning comes the second interview with Porfiry, a masterpiece of cat and mouse. Porfiry rambles, laughs and paces, musing that a clever criminal will circle round him like a butterfly round a candle until it flies straight into his mouth. Raskolnikov, cracking, screams at him to arrest him or let him go. Porfiry hints that he has a ‘little surprise’ waiting behind his door. At that moment the painter Nikolai bursts in and falls on his knees: ‘I am guilty! Mine is the sin! I am the murderer.’ Porfiry is as stunned as anyone. Then the stranger who called Raskolnikov a murderer turns up at his door to apologize: he had seen him at the scene and reported him. He was Porfiry’s surprise, and there is no real evidence after all.

Luzhin wants revenge. That afternoon, in the lodgings he shares with a silly young radical named Lebezyatnikov, he calls Sonya in, gives her a ten-rouble note for the family with great ceremony, and secretly slips a hundred-rouble note into her pocket.

Katerina Ivanovna’s funeral dinner is a grotesque disaster. She has spent most of Raskolnikov’s money to prove she is a lady, almost none of the respectable guests have come, and she squabbles with her German landlady. Into this chaos walks Luzhin, accusing Sonya of stealing a hundred roubles. The note is found in her pocket; the room turns on her. Then Lebezyatnikov speaks up: he saw Luzhin plant it. Raskolnikov explains why. If Sonya were disgraced, Luzhin could prove to Dunya that her brother keeps low company and win her back. Luzhin slinks away, and the landlady throws Katerina Ivanovna and her children into the street.

Raskolnikov follows Sonya home and, after agonized hesitation, lets her guess. She reads it in his face and throws her arms round him: there is no one more unhappy in the world. Then he tries to explain, and every explanation contradicts the last. Money for his mother. Doing good. No: he wanted to become a Napoleon. He wanted to find out whether he was a louse like everybody else or a man, whether he dared to step over, whether he had the right. Did he murder the old woman? No, he cries: ‘I murdered myself, not her!’ Sonya tells him what to do: go to the crossroads, kiss the earth he has defiled, bow to the whole world and say aloud, ‘I am a murderer!’ Then God will send him life again. He is not ready. She offers him her cypress-wood cross.

That evening Katerina Ivanovna, delirious, drags her children through the streets to sing and dance for coins, collapses coughing blood, and dies on Sonya’s bed. Svidrigailov pays for the funeral, places the children in good orphanages, and lets Raskolnikov know, pleasantly, that he heard everything through the wall.

For two or three days Raskolnikov lives in a fog. Then Porfiry comes to his room and drops the act. He knows Raskolnikov is the murderer. He has no proof (a hundred suspicions, he says, don’t make a proof), and Nikolai is a religious peasant who simply wants to ‘take his suffering’. But Porfiry likes Raskolnikov, and offers a deal: confess, and the sentence will be lighter. ‘Be the sun and all will see you,’ he says.

Raskolnikov seeks out Svidrigailov, fearing what he will do with the secret, and finds him in a tavern talking calmly about debauchery and his engagement to a girl not yet sixteen. That evening Svidrigailov lures Dunya to his rooms, locks the door, and tells her the truth: Rodya is the killer, and Svidrigailov can get him out of the country if she will be his. Dunya pulls out a revolver. The first shot grazes his scalp; the second misfires. He tells her to reload. She throws the gun away. He puts his arm round her and asks if she could ever love him. ‘Never!’ He hands her the key and lets her go.

Svidrigailov spends the night giving away his money: three thousand roubles to Sonya, so that she can follow Raskolnikov to Siberia, and fifteen thousand to his bewildered young fiancée. In a seedy hotel he has nightmares: a mouse in his bed, a fourteen-year-old girl who drowned herself, a five-year-old child who leers at him like a harlot. At dawn, in the mist, in front of a sleepy watchman in a copper helmet, he says he is going to America, puts the revolver to his temple, and fires.

The same day Raskolnikov says goodbye to his mother, who refuses to believe anything bad of him and blesses him, and to Dunya, who knows and is glad he is going to confess. Even now he insists that his idea was not stupid; it only looks stupid because he failed. He goes to Sonya, who puts the cypress cross on him. In the Haymarket he kneels and kisses the dirty ground, while the crowd jokes that he must be drunk, or off on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. At the police station a chatty Ilya Petrovich mentions that a man named Svidrigailov shot himself that morning. Raskolnikov turns and leaves. Outside in the yard stands Sonya, white with horror. He goes back up the stairs and says: ‘It was I killed the old pawnbroker woman and her sister Lizaveta with an axe and robbed them.’

The epilogue moves on about eighteen months. Raskolnikov is a convict in a fortress town on a broad Siberian river, the Irtysh. At his trial he confessed everything, but could not say how much was in the purse; he had never opened it. The court, puzzled by a robber who did not use what he stole, was lenient, especially when Razumikhin proved that he had once supported a dying fellow student, and his old landlady told how he had saved two children from a fire. He got eight years of hard labour.

His mother, who never quite admitted to herself what had happened, fell into a delirium and died. Dunya married Razumikhin, and they plan to move to Siberia. Sonya followed the convicts east, took up sewing in the town, and visits Raskolnikov whenever she can. He is cold to her. The other prisoners hate him and once nearly kill him as an unbeliever, but they adore Sonya and call her their little mother. He is not sorry for the murder. He is sorry only that he failed, and that he lacked the strength to kill himself as Svidrigailov did.

Then he falls ill, and in his fever dreams of a plague of microbes sweeping in from Asia that makes everyone certain they alone possess the truth; they fight and kill one another until the world is destroyed. When he recovers, Sonya falls ill too, and for the first time he misses her. One bright morning after Easter, as he sits on a log by the river looking out at the steppe, she comes and sits beside him. Suddenly, without knowing how, he is on his knees, weeping and holding her. They have seven years to wait. That night he takes out Sonya’s New Testament, the one she read Lazarus from, and does not open it. But life, the narrator says, has stepped into the place of theory. His slow renewal, Dostoevsky ends, is another story.

Afterwards Raskolnikov falls apart. He faints at the police station, hides the stolen purse under a stone without even opening it, and lies in a fever for days, nursed by his warm, energetic friend Razumikhin. He insults Luzhin, half-confesses to a police clerk for the thrill of it, and goes back to ring the bell at the scene of the crime. When Marmeladov is run over by a carriage, Raskolnikov gives the family nearly all his money, and feels alive again. Then his mother and Dunya arrive in Petersburg.

The investigator, Porfiry Petrovich, is a giggling, blinking magistrate who seems harmless and misses nothing. He has read Raskolnikov’s article on extraordinary men, and in two long, nerve-shredding interviews he plays cat and mouse with him, without a scrap of real evidence. A house painter, Nikolai, falsely confesses, which ought to save Raskolnikov. Meanwhile Svidrigailov, Dunya’s former employer and pursuer, a charming, depraved, rich man, turns up in Petersburg with designs on her.

Raskolnikov is drawn to Sonya, who has also ‘stepped over’ a line, but out of love. In her bare room she reads him the raising of Lazarus. After Luzhin is dismissed by Dunya and tries to frame Sonya for theft out of spite, Raskolnikov confesses the murders to her. He gives reason after reason: money, his family, Napoleon, the need to know whether he was a louse or a man. Sonya tells him to go to the crossroads, kiss the earth and confess to the world. Svidrigailov, lodging next door, overhears everything.

That same evening Katerina Ivanovna, evicted and half mad, takes her children out to beg in the streets and dies of her consumption. Svidrigailov pays for everything, and lets Raskolnikov know that he heard the confession through the wall.

Porfiry visits Raskolnikov, tells him plainly that he knows, and urges him to confess: a lighter sentence, and a chance at a new life. Svidrigailov lures Dunya to his rooms and tries to use her brother’s secret to win her; she fires at him with a revolver, then throws it down. He lets her go, gives his money away, and shoots himself at dawn. That day Raskolnikov says goodbye to his mother, kneels and kisses the ground in the Haymarket while the crowd jeers, and confesses at the police station, with Sonya waiting outside.

He is sentenced to eight years of hard labour in Siberia. His mother dies; Dunya marries Razumikhin. Sonya follows him, and the convicts come to love her, though they hate him. For a long time he is sorry only that he failed. Then, after an illness, sitting by a broad river one spring morning, he suddenly falls at Sonya’s feet in tears, and knows that he loves her. Life, the narrator says, has taken the place of theory; his slow renewal is another story.