«Crime and Punishment», Fyodor DostoevskyOne chapter of crime, thirty-four chapters of punishment

What it is about, honestly

Rodion Raskolnikov is 23, has dropped out of university and lives in a garret with yellow wallpaper. Broke and short of air, he comes up with a theory: there are ordinary people, and there are those who may step over the law for the sake of a great goal. He decides to test it on himself.

The test takes one chapter. Dostoevsky spends the other thirty-four on what the theory left out: a man who “has the right” can no longer eat, sleep or talk to his own mother.

Dostoevsky first wrote the novel as a first-person confession, then rewrote it. The narrator now stands outside, but rarely leaves the hero’s side: we see Petersburg through his eyes, in the heat and in fever. That is why the book reads not as a moral but as an experience.

A detective story inside out

I expected a whodunit. But here the murderer is known from chapter seven: first to the reader, and soon enough to the investigator. Dostoevsky is not asking “who did it” but “how long will he hold out”, and what exactly will break him.

The investigator, Porfiry Petrovich, truly takes the stage only three times. He has no direct evidence and does not hide it. He simply talks: about Raskolnikov’s article, about psychology, about how the criminal will come by himself. Each talk fills a whole chapter, and these are the tensest pages of the book.

The worst robbery in literature

From his door to the old woman’s house Raskolnikov walked exactly 730 steps: he had counted them in advance. The stolen purse held 317 roubles and 60 kopecks. Those he never counted: he hid the purse under a stone and never spent a kopeck.

He counted the steps, not the money. That is not the author being careless; it is the answer to why he killed. Not for money, and not even for his mother and sister, as he first tells himself. He needed to find out who he was.

Yellow, thirty times

The colour yellow is mentioned 30 times in the Russian original, 18 of them in the first two parts. Wallpaper, furniture, Marmeladov’s face, the water in a glass, Sonya’s ticket.

This is not the Petersburg of postcards. The city is an accomplice here: July heat, taverns, a room more like a cupboard. When Raskolnikov’s mother walks in, she says it is half through his lodging that he has become like this.

Sonya

Sonya Marmeladova is barely visible until part four. Then come two scenes: in one she reads him the raising of Lazarus, in the other he confesses the murder to her. She does not argue with his theory and does not preach. She simply does not leave.

Dostoevsky puts two people side by side who have both “stepped over”, and shows the difference: he stepped over someone else, she stepped over herself. In this book the argument between a theory and a person is won by the person.

Verdict

Read it. Not because it is a classic, but because it is a thriller of some 170,000 words in which the chase happens inside one head. At school it is taught as a book about punishment for a sin. An adult reads it as a book about a clever idea turning out stronger than the person who had it.

Do not skip the epilogue: without it this is the story of a crime, with it the story of a person. One point off for the two-page monologues. Though look who is talking.