Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment

Crime and Punishment appeared in monthly parts in the journal The Russian Messenger throughout 1866. Its hero is Rodion Raskolnikov, a brilliant and impoverished former student in St. Petersburg, who convinces himself that an extraordinary man may break moral law and who murders an elderly pawnbroker and, unexpectedly, her sister. The novel then follows his feverish guilt, a cat-and-mouse game with the investigator Porfiry Petrovich, and his slow turn toward confession through Sonya, a young woman forced into prostitution to feed her family.¹²

Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821 to 1881) had been condemned to death in 1849 for belonging to a radical circle, reprieved at the last moment and sent to a Siberian prison camp until 1854. He wrote the novel in the Russia after the emancipation of the serfs in 1861, a time of reform, poverty and radical ideas such as utilitarianism and nihilism, which Raskolnikov's theory expresses. He was deep in debt and writing against deadlines. He admired Hugo and Balzac, and he took the crime story and turned it into a deep psychological and religious drama.³

The book was a great success on publication. Its method, which follows the guilty mind from the inside, shaped the modern psychological novel, and Nietzsche and Freud both admired Dostoevsky. It influenced writers such as Camus, Kafka and Sartre, and the novel has been adapted for film, theater and opera in many countries.¹³