Crime and Punishment

The mind of a criminal reveals much about ourselves

I first read Dostoevsky’s novel “Crime and Punishment” as a senior in high school. Back then I didn’t grasp a great deal of what Dostoevsky was saying in his tome. However, I vividly remembered one scene in the novel that left an indelible mark in my mind. In his dream, the main character St Petersburg college dropout Raskolnikov is a young boy and he’s walking with his father past a tavern. In front of the tavern is a wagon hitched to an aging horse that looks incapable of pulling any load. As father and son draw nearer the tavern, drunken men come out with the owner of the cart, who encourages them to climb aboard and be taken for a ride by the horse. Men clamber onto the wagon and the owner begins whipping the horse to make it pull. Though the horse pulls with all its might, it is unable to budge the loaded cart. The owner becomes incensed that the horse is failing to do his bidding and whips the horse harder inciting the passengers to beat the horse as well. Soon others begin hitting the animal, which continues to try budging the load. Dostoevsky describes the owner lashing the horse’s face and eyes—to this day this image still affects me. The young boy becomes horrified at the sight of the animal being so mercilessly abused and pleads with his father to intervene. His father stands by passively and finally in an attempt to stay the horse’s suffering the boy rushes the men. He is cast aside and the owner finally kills the animal.

As a young boy Dostoevsky’s main character innately feels empathy with the plight of the animal in his dream. The Jesuits believe that in the adolescent child you’ll find the man he will become. And this is certainly true of Raskolnikov, whose compassion is not reserved for the meanest beast, but extends to fellow humans in the family Marmeladov. The family head Semyon Zaharovitch Marmeladov is an alcoholic clerk Raskolnikov befriends in a tavern, the young man enters after having hocked his father’s flat silver watch with the pawnbroker Alyona Ivanovna, who Raskolnikov is fancifully contemplating killing—the “crime” in the story’s title. Marmeladov has earlier been to see his daughter Sofya (Sonya) Semyonovna from a previous marriage. She has given him 30 kopecks, all her earnings for the day. Sonya has a yellow ticket, the license used by a working girl in Dostoevsky’s Russia. Sonya has sacrificed her virtue to provide for Marmeladov, his consumptive wife Katerina Ivanovna, who manages to work when her health permits, and Katerina’s three young children from an earlier marriage. By the time Raskolnikov has made Marmeladov’s acquaintance, the derelict has spent all of the 30 kopecks on drink. For some reason, Raskolnikov is drawn to this pathetic drunk and accompanies him home to witness his confession to Katerina that he has squandered Sonya’s money on drink. After observing the wretched confrontation between a desperate despairing wife and her pitiful drunken husband, he takes his leave. “As he went out, Raskolnikov had time to put his hand into his pocket, to snatch up the coppers he had received in exchange for his ruble in the tavern and to lay them unnoticed on the window.” It’s something he immediately regrets but cannot bring himself to undo.

The author spends the rest of the story turning the plight of Katerina and Semyon Zaharovitch Marmeladov into allegory of the horse in Raskolnikov’s dream. And by extension, the horse and his plight can be taken as a metaphor for Russia. In modern times, the Russian people have suffered unimaginably at the hands of Napoleon and Hitler invading armies; this in addition to the atrocities visited on the Russian spirit by the Czars and the communists who displaced them—Stalin killed over 20 million Russians implementing his draconian land collectivization alone. The Russian character knows the great suffering and death epitomized by the struggling horse in Raskolnikov’s dream and the painful existence of Marmeladov and Katerina.

As with all great works, “Crime and Punishment” explores multiple themes the principle one being the nature of a criminal and his redemption as a human being. As the novel begins Raskolnikov, the unemployed student dropout, is en route to the fourth floor apartment of a wealthy pawnbroker. The reader learns that his business with the old women is not only to pawn something for rubles but to study himself and his action as if he were on his way to murder and rob the old woman. He realizes, for example, that the frayed tall round hat he wore made him stand out in the crowd of Semnaya Square (the Haymarket), he had to cross to reach the pawnbroker’s flat. “…For this business one should be as little conspicuous as possible.... Trifles, trifles are what matter! Why, it's just such trifles that always ruin everything....” When he had nearly walked the “seven hundred and thirty steps” from his garret room to the fourth floor apartment of Alyona Ivanova in a huge house, “which on one side looked on to the Yekaterininsky canal, and on the other into Sadovaya street, ” he noticed that the only other tenant on the fourth floor was moving out, a favorable development.

After being granted admittance to the old woman’s apartment and receiving a ruble and 15 kopecks for the watch he had come to pawn, he leaves in an agitated state, angry with himself for his contemplation. “’Oh, God, how loathsome it all is! and can I, can I possibly.... No, it's nonsense, it's rubbish!’ he added resolutely. ‘And how could such an atrocious thing come into my head? What filthy things my heart is capable of. Yes, filthy above all, disgusting, loathsome, loathsome!...’” The “atrocious thing” is a mental game he has been playing in which he has questioned the meaning of good and evil. He asks himself why it is accepted that a tyrant like Alyona Ivanovna can cause untold anguish with impunity. He takes it into his head to test how valid is the act of killing the tyrant and ridding the world of her injustice and spreading her ill-gotten gains to those who would benefits most from having them. He overhears this argument in a tavern a year earlier. It was offered by a student conversing with a young officer at a table next to him. In describing the same pawnbroker, Alyona Ivanovna, to the soldier, the student speculates: “… would not one tiny crime be wiped out by thousands of good deeds? For one life thousands would be saved from corruption and decay. One death, and a hundred lives in exchange—it's simple arithmetic! Besides, what value has the life of that sickly, stupid, ill-natured old woman in the balance of existence!” Raskolnikov has articulated this argument in an article published in a magazine entitled “Periodical Review” and in that tavern it was being articulated by someone else, giving credence to his own intellectual musing. The officer asks the student if he could ever bring himself to commit such an act for the noble ends he described and the student says of course not. Like Raskolnikov, the student was musing rather than conjuring a plan of action to be given physical expression.

However, Raskolnikov cannot leave his musing alone and as the story progresses he begins to contemplate the aftermath of the crime. He asks himself “why almost all crimes are so badly concealed and so easily detected, and why almost all criminals leave such obvious traces? He had come to the conclusions that “the chief reason lay not so much in the material impossibility of concealing the crime, as in the criminal himself. Almost every criminal is subject to a failure of will and reasoning power by a childish and phenomenal heedlessness, at the very instant when prudence and caution are most essential. It was his conviction that this eclipse of reason and failure of will power attacked a man like a disease, developed gradually and reached its highest point just before the perpetration of the crime, continued with equal violence at the moment of the crime and for longer or shorter time after, according to the individual case, and then passed off like any other disease.”

In his mind he determined he would not succumb to these failings since ",,, in his own case there could not be such a morbid reaction, that his reason and will would remain unimpaired at the time of carrying out his design, for the simple reason that his design was 'not a crime....’” The author then writes, “that the practical, purely material difficulties of the affair occupied a secondary position in his mind.” Raskolnikov then reasons, “one has but to keep all one's will-power and reason to deal with them (difficulties), and they will all be overcome at the time when once one has familiarized oneself with the minutest details of the business....” This all occurs as he is preparing to walk through the steps to carry out his murderous imaginings. Though, Dostoevsky writes, “In spite of all his agonising inward struggle, he never for a single instant all that time could believe in the carrying out of his plans.” As he leaves his room, careful not to be seen, he begins confronting the difficulties he had reasoned were easy to overcome. Natasha, the cook and cleaning lady for Raskolnikov’s landlady spies him sneaking out. He then recalls that the axe he planned to use as the murder weapon is locked away in the room of the building’s porter. As he approaches the porter’s room, he sees the door is open and the axe waiting to be taken—almost as if fate was conspiring to abet his heinous deed.

Raskolnikov’s plan encounters far more “difficulties” than he had anticipated. Upon arriving at the old woman’s flat, he has to avoid being seen by two painters working in an apartment on the second floor to steal unnoticed up the back stairs to the old woman’s flat on the fourth floor. He knocks, his heart throbbing violently in anticipation. The old woman reluctantly lets him in after recognizing him. She is made wary by his pale appearance and trembling hands. He assures her it’s just a fever and offers her a wrapped package he purports to contain a cigarette case he’s bought to pawn. As she struggles to open the package, he extracts the ax, hidden in a sling inside his overcoat, and strikes the old woman three times on her bare head with the blunt edge of the ax. He then fumbles about searching for her cache of pawned pledges finally succeeding in the items in a trunk under the old woman’s bed. He fills his coat pockets with as many as he can carry. As he is about to leave he’s confronted by the younger sister of the old pawnbroker Lizaveta, a simple soul that the old woman has bullied throughout their lifetime together. Raskolnikov believed that Lizaveta would not be home that evening as she was supposed to be out on a job. However, now fearful of being caught, Raskolnikov also kills her to rid himself of another “difficulty.” In the “collateral damage” he inflicts on this innocent, his rational justification for killing the old woman completely changes from his self-described justifiable act to right social justice into a crime. It was the likes of Lizaveta that this act was to benefit, now she had become its victim.

As he is about to make his getaway, he hears two men, identified later as Koch and Pestryakov, climbing the stairs to the fourth floor. He hides in the old woman’s flat with the door latched until the two, alarmed that the old woman is not answering her door and may be harmed, run to get help. Raskolnikov steals away from the crime scene down two floors to the now empty flat he noticed being painted earlier and hides there when the two men return with two others to aid the old woman. When the group passes, he slipped out of the flat, down the stairs and into the courtyard of the building making good his escape back to his garret apartment, where he falls into a fretful sleep.

The remainder of Dostoevsky’s tale is a psychological thriller in which the main character fights the compulsion to confess his crime. He is summoned to the police station by his landlady taking legal action to get back rent she’s owed. After completing papers stating that he will make good on the debt, he is about to leave when …”a strange idea suddenly occurred to him, to get up at once, to go up to Nikodim Fomitch (Police superintendent of the district where Raskolnikov lives), and tell him everything that had happened yesterday, and then to go with him to his lodgings and to show him the things in the hole in the corner. The impulse was so strong that he got up from his seat to carry it out.” As he is about to he overhears Fomitch and Ilya Porfiry Petrovitch, the assistant police superintendent say that the two painters working on the second floor of the house where Alyona Ivanova was killed had confessed to the crime. For the student who had contemplated committing the perfect crime, fate (the author) was conspiring to make it a reality.

But Dostoevsky’s student is imprisoned by his nature and nurture. He is the middle-class son of his 43 years old Mother, Pulcheria Alexandrovna Raskolnikov—father deceased—and brother to lovely Avdotya Romsnovna (Dounia). Both are sacrificing to put him through school, which he has ceased pursuing for lack of funds. This is a young man besieged with all the middle class baggage of obedience to authority; chivalrous respect for women; a keen sense of right and wrong—despite theoretical beliefs otherwise; an indoctrination in religious belief—now denied but nevertheless engrained; and a well-defined sense of guilt. The article wrote for the magazine entitled “Periodical Review” he analyzed "…the psychology of a criminal before and after the crime." The article states that “the perpetration of a crime is always accompanied by illness.” The author of that article had himself fallen ill, with the symptoms of fever and fits of fainting. Ilya Porfiry Petrovitch has read this article. When Raskolnikov comes forward with his college friend Razumihin to report that he was a patron on the murdered pawnbroker, Petrovitch queries Raskolnikov about the piece.

Porfiry suspects Raskolnikov of the crime but lacks the evidence to pursue him. Furthermore, 22 years old Journeyman housepainter Nikolay Dementyev has confessed to the crime after being caught attempting to sell one of the earrings stolen during the robbery. Raskolnikov had dropped the earring when he had momentarily hidden during his escape down the stairs. Nikolay had found it later and pawned it with Dushkin who ran the dram shop across from the house where Alyona Ivanovna was murdered. Dushkin gave it to the police and Nikolay confronted with the evidence confessed to the crime. Raskolnikov has committed the perfect crime: someone else has taken the blame and the police know who the real culprit is but can’t arrest him for lack of evidence.

Raskolnikov to the end refuses to admit to committing a crime though he is contemplating confessing to Petrovitch: “"Crime? What crime?" he cried in sudden fury (to his sister Dounia, who knows all). "That I killed a vile noxious insect, an old pawnbroker woman, of use to no one!... Killing her was atonement for forty sins. She was sucking the life out of poor people. Was that a crime? I am not thinking of it and I am not thinking of expiating it, and why are you all rubbing it in on all sides? 'A crime! a crime!' Only now I see clearly the imbecility of my cowardice, now that I have decided to face this superfluous disgrace. It's simply because I am contemptible and have nothing in me that I have decided to, perhaps too for my advantage, as that... Porfiry... suggested!”

But the main character of this story is a man no longer comfortable in his own skin. He has become someone he does not know and someone he does not like. The person he is has caused great torment and grief for Sonia—who has become devoted to him, his sister, and his mother, all of whom are concerned for his well being. Both Sonia and Dounia are terrified that he will kill himself, something he does contemplate, but not out of a sense of grief or guilt. “Yes, to escape the disgrace I thought of drowning myself, Dounia, but as I looked into the water, I thought that if I had considered myself strong till now I'd better not be afraid of disgrace,” he explains. Curiously Raskolnikov considers he has only two options, imprisonment or suicide—the option of not confessing and continuing on is not open, because he could face neither Dounia nor especially Sonia. “He was afraid of Sonia, too. Sonia stood before him as an irrevocable sentence. He must go his own way or hers.”

After he confesses killing Alyona and Lizaveta, “she (Sonia) cries jumping up, and her eyes that had been full of tears suddenly began to shine. ‘What are you to do?’ (She seized him by the shoulder, he got up, looking at her almost bewildered.) ‘Go at once, this very minute, stand at the cross-roads, bow down, first kiss the earth which you have defiled and then bow down to all the world and say to all men aloud, 'I am a murderer!' Then God will send you life again. Will you go, will you go?’ she asked him, trembling all over, snatching his two hands, squeezing them tight in hers and gazing at him with eyes full of fire.” Hers are the words of a devoted Christian who sees confession as the road to redemption.

After more agonizing, Raskolnikov eventually does as she exhorted, finding a sense of release in the act. "'Go to the cross-roads, bow down to the people, kiss the earth, for you have sinned against it too, and say aloud to the whole world, 'I am a murderer.'" He trembled, remembering that. And the hopeless misery and anxiety of all that time, especially of the last hours, had weighed so heavily upon him that he positively clutched at the chance of this new unmixed, complete sensation. It came over him like a fit; it was like a single spark kindled in his soul and spreading fire through him. Everything in him softened at once and the tears started into his eyes. He fell to the earth on the spot.... He knelt down in the middle of the square, bowed down to the earth, and kissed that filthy earth with bliss and rapture. He got up and bowed down a second time."

He then reluctantly finds his way to the police station to confess to Ilya Porfiry Petrovitch. But before he can make his confession, word comes that Arkady Ivanovitch Svidrigaïlov has killed himself. Stunned by the revelation, he leaves only to find Sonia, his conscious, waiting for him outside. He immediately returns to Petrovitch and makes his confession. "It was I killed the old pawnbroker woman and her sister Lizaveta with an axe and robbed them," he states to an amazed Porfiry Petrovitch.

Arkady Ivanovitch Svidrigaïlov is another significant character in Dostoevsky’s epic: “that man had some hidden power over him (Raskolnikov).” Svidrigaïlov was married to Marfa Petrovna who had employed Dounia as a governess for her children from a previous marriage. Svidrigaïlov smitten by the young governess had made unwelcome advances to her that Marfa Petrovna had concluded was at Dounia’s instigation. Dismissed in disgrace Dounia, her reputation ruined, is vindicated with Svidrigaïlov’s confession to his wife that he was the villain. After his wealthy wife dies of a stroke—though speculation abounds that he poisoned her, he follows Dounia and her mother to St. Petersburg to stop Dounia sacrificial wedding of convenience to Pyotr Petrovitch Luzhin, a distant relative of Marfa Petrovna. He does so by not only offering Dounia 10,000 rubles but by informing her that his wife Marfa Petrovna has willed her 3,000 rubles, thus giving her the means to reject Luzhin. Svidrigaïlov schemes to win Dounia even threatening to report to the police that he had overhead Raskolnikov confess the crime to Sonya.

However, it is also Svidrigaïlov who brings resolutions to the many diverging strands of Dostoevsky multithreaded narrative. After Marmeladov is run over in the street and dies of his injuries and his wife Katerina succumbs to the grief and consumption that has been plaguing her, Svidrigaïlov pays to bury them both. He then ensures that Katerina’s three children are placed in a good orphanage. Finally, he makes financial arrangements that enable Sonia to stop selling her virtue to earn a living. “Here are three 5-per-cent bonds to the value of three thousand roubles,” Svidrigaïlov says. “Take those for yourself, entirely for yourself, and let that be strictly between ourselves, so that no one knows of it, whatever you hear. You will need the money, for to go on living in the old way, Sofya Semyonovna, is bad, and besides there is no need for it now.”

Totally in love with Dounia—something that Raskolnikov knows and warns him off—and knowing he hasn’t any chance of having his affection returned, he determines to end it with a shot to the head on the street near the Little Neva in the presence of a derelict. With Svidrigaïlov’s suicide followed by Raskonikov’s confession the main narrative concludes. It is followed by an epilogue that describes Raskolnikov’s imprisonment with Sonia faithfully waiting for the seven years before he will be released.

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