Title- Crime and Punishment is a cause and effect phrase, implying that punishment follows crime, which ends up being true in the novel.
Author and Publication- Fyodor Dostoevsky, 1866
Characters- Raskolnikov’s name translates to “schism” or “divide” in english. He is motivated by both halves of said divide, one encouraging him towards nihilism, immorality, and murder, while the other steers him towards religion, love, and morality. His struggles inside his own conscience pretty much write the book.
Sonya is this novel’s christ character. She is almost completely good (except for prostitution), and embodies the moral side of Raskolnikov’s mind. However, Sonya acts like a foil to the evil side of Raskolnikov’s mind. Her name roughly translates to “wisdom”.
Pyotr Petrovitch Luzhin’s name translates to “rock son of rock puddle”. Someone named Mr Puddle is difficult to take seriously about anything. Luzhin is motivated throughout the novel by a desire to marry Dunya and basically have her be his money slave. He appears not to have any moral issues with his motive. To some extent, he is a foil to Dunya, who cares nothing about money and is very loving.
Svidrigailov is one messed up dude. It is difficult to understand his motivation because he seems to be mentally disturbed on some level. He is somewhat pedophilic, but also suicidal and guilty. His name translates as “aristocrat”.
Setting- St Petersburg is described as stuffy, smelly, and morally degenerate. Basically, 1860s St Petersburg is not a nice place to be in. The culture of poverty and desperation is stifling. This makes it a perfect spot for the theme of “crime is followed by punishment” because of the amount of desperate crime and harsh punishment on the hands of the citizens.
Siberia, on the other hand, although filled with criminals, is clean and fresh. It is a moral respite for Raskolnikov and contributes to his moral redemption.
Symbols- Blood in Crime and Punishment represents Raskolnikov’s immoral half, but also the guilty conscience and confusion he experiences after committing the crime. He freaks out after finding traces of blood on his sock, desperately trying to find a way to get rid of them. In reality no one would ever be able to deduce Raskolnikov’s guilt from the socks.
The Haymarket recurs throughout the novel. A seedy part of St. Petersburg, it is filled with immorality. Raskolnikov often finds himself in the Haymarket, especially when he sets out walking with no given destination in mind. The haymarket represents a type of eternal return. Anywhere Rask goes he will eventually return to the haymarket.
Clean air in the novel represents moral and mental clarity. In St. Petersburg, with its stuffy, polluted alleys, causes Raskolnikov to make terrible decisions and moral missteps. This all changes when he arrives in Siberia and achieves moral redemption.
Language use and style- Diction: Dostoevsky writes in a very complicated sentence structure. Russian translation does not ease this.
Syntax is effected quite a bit by translation. Some translations have a normal english syntax, while some preserve the original russian.
Dostoevsky doesn’t use much figurative language. Maybe it’s a russian thing.
The tone in the novel is very academic, obviously geared towards an upper class audience.
The mood of the novel is generally dark, often emphasizing the less attractive parts of St Petersburg shamelessly.
Plot Structure and Narrative Techniques- Dostoevsky makes excellent use of foreshadowing, especially with the 4 dreams the novel is structured about. Each dream is either foreshadowing something to happen later in the novel or is resolved in a later dream. Suspense is used in necessity as Dostoevsky was writing the novel in installments in a magazine. No flashbacks or surprise endings were used in the novel. The novel is easily divided into six parts and an epilogue because of the way they were published.
Point of View- The novel is third person omniscient. However, the narrative mainly follows the events going on in Raskolnikov’s head. This allows for much greater character depth because the reader can understand other character’s reactions to Raskolnikov’s mental instability.
Archetypes- In the novel, Raskolnikov takes on the archetype of a split or confused hero. This type of protagonist’s struggle is an inner one. This type of hero has to make the all-important choice between good and evil.
Sonya, on the other hand, is a christ archetype. She is almost completely righteous and is essential in providing redemption to Raskolnikov, the protagonist. She is very religious and is mainly motivated by a sense of divine purpose.
Blood in the novel represents guilt and violence. Throughout the ages, blood has been a primal, violent motif, and Crime and Punishment is no different. The blood on Raskolnikov’s sock causes him to go into a frenzy of guilt, something that is also commonly related to blood throughout history.
Allusions- Dostoevsky alludes to Lazarus in the novel when Raskolnikov asks Sonya to read him the passage in the bible. It is clear the passage has special significance to Sonya. Raskolnikov longs for some kind of chance to be redeemed like Lazarus. He is still proud, but his delusions of Napoleon-esque grandeur are beginning to fade. The Lazarus story also serves as foreshadowing, predicting Raskolnikov’s return to humanity at the end of the novel.
Dostoevsky also alludes to Napoleon. At one point, Raskolnikov admits that he committed the crime in order to become a kind of Napoleon-like person. Raskolnikov’s rationalization of this is that Napoleon was responsible for lots of people’s deaths in order to achieve his objectives, so how could killing a louse like Lizaveta be immoral at all?
Dostoevsky also alludes to Golgotha, the place of christ’s crucifixion. In a fragment from Raskolnikov’s brain, he compares Dounia to Christ. He thinks she’s sacrificing herself to Luzhin to pay for Raskolnikov’s “sins.” He mentions Golgotha but means St Petersburg because that is where Luzhin is.
Major Themes- One major theme in the novel is that crime is always followed by punishment. Every immoral act in the novel is followed by an inevitable punishment. Sometimes this consequence is self-inflicted, sometimes it is caused by others, and a few times it is executed by the law. As Raskolnikov said: “The old woman was merely a sickness . . . I was in a hurry to step over . . . it wasn’t a human being I killed, it was a principle! So I killed the principle, but I didn’t step over, I stayed on this side . . . All I managed to do was kill. And I didn’t even manage that, as it turns out . . .” (198). This quote is difficult to understand in english, but the russian “step over” means to commit a crime in english. So Raskolnikov is engaging in a play on words in this quote, but is also explaining his error in committing a crime and the inevitability of his punishment.
Another major theme in the novel is that reality is not black and white. Which is to say reality is ambiguous in itself. Even Raskolnikov had issues telling what was the real truth: “But of that—of that he [Raskolnikov] had no recollection, and yet every minute he felt that he had forgotten something he ought to remember. He worried and tormented himself trying to remember.” (108). When Raskolnikov wakes up from his delirium, his reality is extremely confused. He’s forgotten what he most likely would rather forget. But here we see that forgetting is actually causing him pain. Raskolnikov really wants to see life clearly. It’s just that everything is so confusing that he can’t sort it out.
Big Quote-
“At first—long before indeed—he had been much occupied with one question; why almost all crimes are so badly concealed and so easily detected, and why almost all criminals leave such obvious traces? He had come gradually to many different and curious conclusions, and in his opinion the chief reason lay not so much in the material impossibility of concealing the crime, as in the criminal himself. Almost every criminal is subject to a failure of will and reasoning power by a childish and phenomenal heedlessness, at the very instant when prudence and caution are most essential. It was his conviction that 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 longer or shorter time after, according to the individual case, and then passed off like any other disease. The question whether the disease gives rise to the crime, or whether the crime from its own peculiar nature is always accompanied by something of the nature of disease, he did not yet feel able to decided.
When he reached these conclusions, he decided that in his own case there could not be such a morbid reaction, that his reason and will would remain unimpaired at the time of carrying out his design, for the simple reason that his design was ‘not a crime….’ We will omit all the process by means of which he arrived at this last conclusion; we have run too far ahead already…. We may add only that the practical, purely material difficulties of the affair occupied a secondary position in his mind. ‘One has but to keep all one’s will-power and reason to deal with them, and they will all be overcome at the time when once one has familiarised oneself with the minutest details of the business….’ But this preparation had never been begun. His final decisions were what he came to trust least, and when the hour struck, it all came to pass quite differently, as it were accidentally and unexpectedly.” (38)
Raskolnikov tries to justify his crime in this quote. He seems to have some sort of superiority complex which causes him to overestimate his ability to perform tasks of moral difficulty. His pride and rationalistic ideology lead him to look down on other people as mere lice. He believes that he is part of an elite “superman” echelon and can therefore transgress accepted moral standards for higher purposes such as utilitarian good. However, that guilt that torments him after he murders Alyona Ivanovna and Lizaveta and his later faintness and confusion at the mere thought of the murders is proof to him that he is not Napoleon. However, Raskolnikov is not a purely focused character. He is plagued by a fissure that divides his intellectual pursuits into two. These two characters are best represented as his cold, intellectual detached side, which emphasizes power and self-will (the Napoleon side), and his warm, humane compassionate side, which suggests warmth and humanity. The intellectual side is a result of his deliberate and premeditated actions; that is, when he is functioning on this side, he never acts spontaneously, but instead, every action is decided in advance. It is this aspect of his personality that enables him to formulate his theories about crime and to commit the crime. One of Raskolnikov’s sides is the cold, intellectual, murdering one aforementioned. But the other side of Rodya’s character is the warm, compassionate side. It operates without an having to plan before. His first and immediate reaction to any situation represents this aspect of his personality. Consequently, he will often act in a warm, friendly, charitable, or humane manner, and then when he has had a chance to think over his actions intellectually, he regrets them. For instance, when he spontaneously gives Katerina Marmeladov his last money, he regrets it shortly afterwards. Or when he protects the drunk girl from the predatory man, but changes his mind after he thinks about it. This quote embodies the conflicting ideas and emotions going on in Raskolnikov’s mind before he commits the crime. The quote also offers some reasons for why the crime didn’t work out the way it was planned, for example, Raskolnikov has insufficient willpower to completely overcome his more passionate side. Raskolnikov scorns men of little mental strength in this quote, only to find himself among them.