Crime and Punishment

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How to talk about Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment (1866) when the plot is complicated, the ideas complex, and so much has been said already?  I started reading the novel in 2024 and carried it with me for the first hundred kilometres of the Camino de Santiago walk in Spain, only to leave it behind in an albergue in Pamplona. I hadn’t read a word, and it was weighing down my light backpack. I bought a fresh copy back in Sydney at the end of 2024 and finished reading it in the first half of 2025. In other words, my memory of the book is already fragmented, and I have no intention of revising. What has stayed with me in these circumstances is all I promise to write about. 

At the heart of the book is the characterisation of Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikov – a student in St Petersburg, who has stopped attending university and is living in poverty. He has an overactive mind, and a high intelligence alienates him from most people and threatens to derail his acceptance of social norms. Taken to its extremes, murder is possible for one who ‘wanted to become a Napoleon’, since ‘power is given only to the one who dares to reach down and take it’ (p. 418). Having murdered on the basis of an idea -- and in response to extreme poverty and his sister’s sacrifice in marrying an older man to relieve the family’s misfortune -- the novel explores the psychological consequences of guilt, and the redemption Raskolnikov eventually finds in kind acts, and the love of an even more downtrodden character, Sonya.

The cat-and-mouse aspect of the novel is the pursuit of Raskolnikov by a clever detective, Petrovich Porfiry, who realises Raskolnikov’s guilt, though he can’t prove the murder. Instead, Porfiry slowly builds a case and hopes for Raskolnikov’s confession, which comes only when he is ready, and at the cost of the pain it causes for his adoring mother and sister, Dunya. Here we have echoes of the surrounding cast to Christ’s acquiescence to his crucifixion – Mother Mary (Raskolnikov’s mother and sister) and Mary Magdalene (Sonya). Sonya, though forced into prostitution by her family’s extreme poverty, is a deeply spiritual person and her goodness ultimately saves Raskolnikov. This redemption doesn’t happen immediately at the point of his confession, but after further suffering in prison in Siberia, when he finally accepts Sonya’s presence, when they are both ‘resurrected by love [as] the heart of each held infinite sources of life for the heart of the other’ (p. 549).

By the time Dostoyevsky had written Crime and Punishment, he had spent four years in a prison camp in Siberia, his hands and feet shackled, living in the most appalling conditions. His own crime had been to read works banned works, including Belinsky’s ‘Letter to Gogol’. With other intellectuals, he was very nearly shot by firing squad for this crime, reprieved at the last moment by the Czar's intervention. We nearly didn’t have Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, or The Brothers Karamazov. Spend a few minutes reading about Dostoyevsky’s life and you will see that the extremes of emotion, and the rich, complex and troubling thinking expressed in Crime and Punishment doesn’t come from a man who spent his life in a library away from the world, but a man whose pain, faith, love and intellect are all caught up in the upheaval of the times.

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