Marfa Petrovna Svidrigaïlova – Svidrigaïlov’s deceased wife, whom he is suspected of having murdered, and who he claims has visited him as a ghost. In Pulkheria Alexandrovna’s letter to her son, Marfa Petrovna is said to have vigorously defended Dunya against Svidrigailov, and introduced her to Luzhin. She leaves Dunya 3000 rubles in her will.
Nikolai Dementiev (Николай Дементьев), also known as Mikolka – A house painter who happens to be nearby at the time of the murder and is initially suspected of the crime. Driven by memories of the teachings of his Old Believer sect, which holds it to be supremely virtuous to suffer for another person’s crime, he falsely confesses to the murders.
Polina Mikhailovna Marmeladova (Полина Михайловна Мармеладова) – Ten-year-old adopted daughter of Semyon Zakharovich Marmeladov and younger stepsister to Sonya, sometimes known as Polechka and Polya.
Themes
Nihilism, rationalism and utilitarianism
Dostoevsky’s letter to Katkov reveals his immediate inspiration, to which he remained faithful even after his original plan evolved into a much more ambitious creation: a desire to counteract what he regarded as nefarious consequences arising from the doctrines of Russian nihilism. In the novel, Dostoevsky pinpointed the dangers of both utilitarianism and rationalism, the main ideas of which inspired the radicals, continuing a fierce criticism he had already started with his Notes from Underground. Dostoevsky utilized the characters, dialogue and narrative in Crime and Punishment to articulate an argument against Westernizing ideas.
He thus attacked a peculiar Russian blend of French utopian socialism and Benthamite utilitarianism, which had developed under revolutionary thinkers such as Nikolai Chernyshevsky and became known as rational egoism. The radicals refused to recognize themselves in the novel’s pages, since Dostoevsky pursued nihilistic ideas to their most extreme consequences. Dimitri Pisarev ridiculed the notion that Raskolnikov’s ideas could be identified with those of the radicals of the time. The radicals’ aims were altruistic and humanitarian, but they were to be achieved by relying on reason and suppressing the spontaneous outflow of Christian compassion.
Chernyshevsky’s utilitarian ethic proposed that thought and will in Man were subject to the laws of physical science. Dostoevsky believed that such ideas limited man to a product of physics, chemistry and biology, negating spontaneous emotional responses. In its latest variety, Russian nihilism encouraged the creation of an élite of superior individuals to whom the hopes of the future were to be entrusted.
Raskolnikov exemplifies the potentially disastrous hazards contained in such an ideal. Contemporary scholar Joseph Frank writes that “the moral-psychological traits of his character incorporate this antinomy between instinctive kindness, sympathy, and pity on the one hand and, on the other, a proud and idealistic egoism that has become perverted into a contemptuous disdain for the submissive herd”.
Raskolnikov’s inner conflict in the opening section of the novel results in a utilitarian-altruistic justification for the proposed crime: why not kill a wretched and “useless” old moneylender to alleviate the human misery? Dostoevsky wants to show that this utilitarian style of reasoning had become widespread and commonplace; it was by no means the solitary invention of Raskolnikov’s tormented and disordered mind. Such radical and utilitarian ideas act to reinforce the innate egoism of Raskolnikov’s character, and help justify his contempt for humanity’s lower qualities and ideals. He even becomes fascinated with the majestic image of a Napoleonic personality who, in the interests of a higher social good, believes that he possesses a moral right to kill. Indeed, his “Napoleon-like” plan impels him toward a well-calculated murder, the ultimate conclusion of his self-deception with utilitarianism.
The environment of Saint Petersburg
Dostoevsky was among the first to recognize the symbolic possibilities of city life and imagery drawn from the city. I. F. I. Evnin regards Crime and Punishment as the first great Russian novel “in which the climactic moments of the action are played out in dirty taverns, on the street, in the sordid back rooms of the poor”.
Dostoevsky’s Petersburg is the city of unrelieved poverty; “magnificence has no place in it, because magnificence is external, formal abstract, cold”. Dostoevsky connects the city’s problems to Raskolnikov’s thoughts and subsequent actions. The crowded streets and squares, the shabby houses and taverns, the noise and stench, all are transformed by Dostoevsky into a rich store of metaphors for states of mind. Donald Fanger asserts that “the real city … rendered with a striking concreteness, is also a city of the mind in the way that its atmosphere answers Raskolnikov’s state and almost symbolizes it. It is crowded, stifling, and parched.”
In his depiction of Petersburg, Dostoevsky accentuates the squalor and human wretchedness that pass before Raskolnikov’s eyes. He uses Raskolnikov’s encounter with Marmeladov to contrast the heartlessness of Raskolnikov’s convictions with a Christian approach to poverty and wretchedness. Dostoevsky believes that the moral “freedom” propounded by Raskolnikov is a dreadful freedom “that is contained by no values, because it is before values”.
In seeking to affirm this “freedom” in himself, Raskolnikov is in perpetual revolt against society, himself, and God. He thinks that he is self-sufficient and self-contained, but at the end “his boundless self-confidence must disappear in the face of what is greater than himself, and his self-fabricated justification must humble itself before the higher justice of God”. Dostoevsky calls for the regeneration and renewal of “sick” Russian society through the re-discovery of its national identity, its religion, and its roots.
Structure
The novel is divided into six parts, with an epilogue. The notion of “intrinsic duality” in Crime and Punishment has been commented upon, with the suggestion that there is a degree of symmetry to the book. Edward Wasiolek, who has argued that Dostoevsky was a skilled craftsman, highly conscious of the formal pattern in his art, has likened the structure of Crime and Punishment to a “flattened X”, saying:
Parts I–III of Crime and Punishment present the predominantly rational and proud Raskolnikov: Parts IV–VI, the emerging “irrational” and humble Raskolnikov. The first half of the novel shows the progressive death of the first ruling principle of his character; the last half, the progressive birth of the new ruling principle. The point of change comes in the very middle of the novel.
This compositional balance is achieved by means of the symmetrical distribution of certain key episodes throughout the novel’s six parts. The recurrence of these episodes in the two halves of the novel, as David Bethea has argued, is organized according to a mirror-like principle, whereby the “left” half of the novel reflects the “right” half.
The seventh part of the novel, the Epilogue, has attracted much attention and controversy. Some of Dostoevsky’s critics have criticized the novel’s final pages as superfluous, anticlimactic, unworthy of the rest of the work, while others have defended it, offering various schemes that they claim prove its inevitability and necessity. Steven Cassedy argues that Crime and Punishment “is formally two distinct but closely related, things, namely a particular type of tragedy in the classical Greek mold and a Christian resurrection tale”. Cassedy concludes that “the logical demands of the tragic model as such are satisfied without the Epilogue in Crime and Punishment … At the same time, this tragedy contains a Christian component, and the logical demands of this element are met only by the resurrection promised in the Epilogue”.
Style
Crime and Punishment is written from a third-person omniscient perspective. It is told primarily from the point of view of Raskolnikov, but does at times switch to the perspective of other characters such as Svidrigaïlov, Razumikhin, Luzhin, Sonya or Dunya. This narrative technique, which fuses the narrator very closely with the consciousness and point of view of the central characters, was original for its period.
Frank notes that Dostoevsky’s use of time shifts of memory and manipulation of temporal sequence begins to approach the later experiments of Henry James, Joseph Conrad, Virginia Woolf, and James Joyce. A late nineteenth-century reader was, however, accustomed to more orderly and linear types of expository narration.
This led to the persistence of the legend that Dostoevsky was an untidy and negligent craftsman, and to observations like the following by Melchior de Vogüé: “A word … one does not even notice, a small fact that takes up only a line, have their reverberations fifty pages later … so that the continuity becomes unintelligible if one skips a couple of pages”.
Dostoevsky uses different speech mannerisms and sentences of different length for different characters. Those who use artificial language—Luzhin, for example—are identified as unattractive people. Mrs. Marmeladov’s disintegrating mind is reflected in her language. In the original Russian text, the names of the major characters have something of a double meaning, but in translation the subtlety of the Russian language is predominantly lost due to differences in language structure and culture. For example, the original Russian title (“Преступление и наказание”) is not the direct equivalent to the English “Crime and Punishment”. “Преступление” (Prestupléniye) is literally translated as ‘a stepping across’. The physical image of crime as crossing over a barrier or a boundary is lost in translation, as is the religious implication of transgression.
Reception
The first part of Crime and Punishment published in the January and February issues of The Russian Messenger met with public success. In his memoirs, the conservative belletrist Nikolay Strakhov recalled that Crime and Punishment was the literary sensation of 1866 in Russia. Tolstoy’s novel War and Peace was being serialized in The Russian Messenger at the same time as Crime and Punishment.
The novel soon attracted the criticism of the liberal and radical critics. G.Z. Yeliseyev sprang to
