Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment seems to me a series of theoretical human experiments: put a person in this this or that extreme circumstance and see what happens. What about adding a character that caricatures or subverts one or more of their key characteristics? What does how they respond to this mirror reveal about them? What do all these things tell us about humanity as a whole?

Murder in Theory

Crime and Punishment tells the story of a murder and its punishment. Ralskonikov is a desperately poor man— so poor he has dropped out of law school. He is financially supported by his similarly poor mother and sister. Upon learning that his sister is marrying a terrible person for money in order to further support him, he hatches a plan: he will kill Aloyna, a pawnbroker woman who was bullying the poor in his community anyway, and steal the large stores of wealth she is sure to have. While doing so, he forgets to lock the door and also ends up killing the woman’s sister, Lizaveta, who was painted as a good and innocent person. The murder is initially presented as a desperate and poor man’s attempt to improve his and his family’s situation. However, soon after he kills the women, it is slowly revealed that this utilitarian justification was just a cover. It turns out that crime was more a means for him to answer a question: is he great enough to commit a crime and also use it to be great? In short, is he superior to the average human being?

The first clue we have that this murder isn’t just about money is given when Ralskonikov not only justifies murder, but compares himself to other apparently more fallible murderers: “…. why almost all crimes are so badly concealed and so easily detected, and why almost all criminals leave such obvious traces?… Almost every criminal is subject to failure of will and reasoning power by a childish and phenomenal heedlessness at the very instant when prudence and caution are most essential.”

In this vein of thought, he does not even mention poverty or wealth. To him, committing murder ‘well’ is more a test of character, will and ability than about utilitarianism or even morality. Indeed, soon after he commits the crime, he hides his loot and never touches it again. Later, we learn that before he killed the pawnbroker woman and her sister, he published a paper arguing that a certain class of men are superior and are therefore justified in killing others to get ahead. His need for money is at first just a secondary reason then becomes altogether irrelevant. Presumably, he commits a crime because he wants to prove that he is a member of his theorised superior class, then invents a practical reason as a front for his experiment.

It turns out that he, apparently, is not one of the better/superior ones. From the moment he brings the axe down on Aloyna’s head, Ralskonikov becomes like a man possessed or hypnotised. He loses clarity and control of his body and words, and becomes a dithering, blabbering mess. Coincidentally, Ralskonikov likens committing a crime to contracting a disease. Following the above quote, he hypothesises, “this eclipse of reason and failure of willpower 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 a longer or shorter time after… the question whether the disease gives rise to the crime, or whether the crime … is always accompanied by something of the nature of the disease” (57-8). Ironically, he fulfils his own prophesy. He also actually falls sick— he has a fever before, during and after the crime. Many times, he more or less confesses to the murder in front of friends and acquaintances, none of whom take him seriously for a long time. This failure to conceal his guilt leads to his subsequent arrest.

Most importantly, his physical and mental ‘diseases’ suggest that he has failed at his mission to prove himself as a superior species as he has failed to commit a crime and get away with it. In all his theorising about greatness and disease, he ignores the elephant in the room: the women— the fact that he has mercilessly taken human lives. Instead, the only crime he recognises is that he could not hold it together enough to use the crime to become great. Sitting in jail, he tries and fails to feel remorse— ” ‘Why does my action strike them as so horrible?… Is it because it was a crime? What is meant by a crime? My conscience is at rest. Of course it was a legal crime, of course, the letter of the law was broken and blood was shed. Well, punish me for the letter of the law… and that’s enough… in that case many of the benefactors of mankind who snatched power for themselves instead of inheriting it ought to have been punished at their first steps. But those men succeeded and so they were right, and I didn’t, so I had no right to have taken that step.’ It was only in that he recognised his criminality, only in the fact that he had been unsuccessful and had confessed it.”

The opening of Crime and Punishment opens with Ralskonikov’s undeniable and abject poverty. With this, Dostoyevsky gives readers a compelling reason to pity this character, for us to say, “What he did was wrong, but he was really desperate and you can’t blame him”, only to snatch it right away. By the end of the book, the crime has become nothing more than a means for Ralskonikov to conduct a narcissistic self-experiment. The only repentance he offers is for his failure within the scope of his theory. Ralskonikov’s reality— or our judgement of him— is then split, between the mental and physical realm. In the former, he is repulsive and hateful. In the latter, he is pitiable, almost relatable.

Setting: Place, Freedom and Captivity

Throughout the novel, Dostoyevsky dwells heavily on details in the setting: the sun setting over the Neva River, the dirty wooden pavements, the tomb-like claustrophobia of Ralskonikov’s lodgings.

Each of these is endowed with significance: the river is the meeting place of contemplation and death. The pavements are the paths characters walk again and again, metaphorically in an upward or downward spiral, towards their eventual downfall or salvation. Until Ralskonikov gets to Siberia, he is constantly surrounded by others, whether he wants or not. As such, these physical locations also represent how the relationships in his life are for him smothering and intrusive. Friends, family and strangers are constantly showing up uninvited— at times, they simply walk into his room; other times, they just happen to be where he tries to go to be alone. While he confesses his crime to Sonya, Svidrigailov eavesdrops in the next room over. The omnipresence of his community, far from being a comfort, is nothing but tormenting and pesky for a mentally tortured introvert with a damning secret. While Ralskonikov is technically a free man in St. Petersburg, it is as if he lives in a high surveillance state with zero privacy.

The characters speak of Siberia as a place to flee from the law, as a place of freedom. It is also where the jail is located. When Ralskonikov confesses and gives himself up to be arrested, he ironically and fittingly finds more freedom there. It is also where he is relieved from the stress of the theoretical-literal dichotomy and the shell he lives in finally cracks open to reveal a repentant heart— not towards Aloyna or Lizaveta, but towards Sonya. It is unclear exactly why. Perhaps it is because he committed the crime in the theoretical realm, which the city represents. The city, where everything has a double meaning; the center of intellect and calculation. In the wilderness, in contrast, instinct trumps reason and it is only there that Ralskonikov can free himself enough from theorising to access true feeling. Dostoyevky puts it as such: “Everything, even his crime, his sentence and imprisonment, seemed to him now in the first rush of feeling an external strange fact with which he had no concern. But he could not think long together of anything… could not have analysed anything consciously; he was simply feeling”. Crime and Punishment references the story of Lazarus quite liberally and following this ‘awakening’, it does so again. Ralskonnikov ‘comes to life’, transforming from cold and detached to emotional and warm; even his relationships with his fellow inmates are immediately transformed following this thaw.

Perhaps Dostoyevsky suggests here that to live in theory is to live in a ‘tomb’,the word he uses to describe Ralskonikov’s lodgings in St. Petersburg, an allusion to Lazarus’s tomb. Such a life shuts one in and reeks of death and decay— Lazarus’s sisters worry about the stench by the time Jesus comes around. Sonya is presented as a sort of saintly figure. Ralskonikov’s repentance to her precedes merely a suggestion of his later repentance to society, as if to Dostoyevsky, personal and spiritual repentance is more important than a societal or legal one.