Picture this: a grimy city overrun with hungry children, drunks, and beggars. Families crowd into tiny apartments whose rent they can barely pay.
Farmers are forced to abandon their land and seek an urban living, but there’s no work to be found. Desperate to feed their families, the beaten-down newcomers turn to robbery and prostitution.
If you liked Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, get ready for your next Russian novel.
But be warned: Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment won’t land you in the glittering high society of Anna Karenina.
Instead, it’ll take you on a stomach-churning journey to the dark underworld of pre-revolutionary Russia.
I won’t mince words: Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment isn’t an easy book to read.
It’s an unflinching look at gruesome poverty - and the even more gruesome effects of despair on one man’s mind.
At the same time, it leads to a tortured redemption that will both haunt and uplift you. In fact, it’s such a gut-wrenching look at the best and worst sides of human nature that it’s one of my favorite classic books for beginners.
If you’re ready to journey into the dark side of Russian life - and the human heart - start by reading this Crime and Punishment summary.
Crime and Punishment Summary
In the late 1800s, the city of St. Petersburg was a living hell.
Built as a pride project to rival Western countries’ great cities, it turned out to be a failure. The city’s poor design left it swamped by frequent floods, while its sewage crept into the drinking water and caused devastating cholera outbreaks.
The pressure mounted when, in 1861, Czar Alexander II abolished serfdom, hoping to prevent the peasants from rising up in revolution.
However, this progressive action backfired.
Without farming to sustain them, Russia’s peasants struggled to earn a living. The displaced peasants flooded into St. Petersburg, seeking in vain for work and shelter.
Crime and Punishment opens with a former law student, Raskolnikov, looking out on the city’s misery from the tiny apartment that he can’t afford.
Raskolnikov is so overwhelmed by hopelessness that he’s given up trying to support himself. His mother and sister were once respectable people in their country village and he relies on their support to survive.
Raskolnikov’s sister Dunya is a beautiful and intelligent woman. However, their family has become so poor that she has to endure richer men shamelessly offering to buy her hand in marriage.
Meanwhile, Raskolnikov meets a hopeless drunk at the local tavern, who describes how his pure-hearted daughter Sonya has been forced into prostitution to support the family.
Tortured, helpless, and resentful of these circumstances, Raskolnikov locks himself in his apartment to brood.
Finally, he emerges with a feverish plan: to murder and rob an old woman who acts as a pawnbroker.
After some tense false starts, Raskolnikov musters his courage. He sneaks into the woman’s house and kills her with an ax.
When the old woman’s mentally handicapped sister witnesses the crime, he kills her too. But instead of robbing her wealth as planned, Raskolnikov only takes a few small items before he flees the scene.
The trauma of committing murder leaves Raskolnikov in a state of near-delirium.
As he stumbles aimlessly around St. Petersburg, the police begin to suspect him, but he evades their questioning.
After witnessing his drunkard friend die in the street, Raskolnikov seeks out his daughter Sonya to give her his last few rubles. As they begin to connect, Raskolnikov interrogates her about her situation and discovers that her faith in God sustains her through the misery of her life.
Sonya’s, Dunya’s, and Raskolnikov’s situations become more intertwined and more desperate. Eventually, Raskolnikov confesses to Sonya that he is the murderer.
Sonya is horrified at Raskolnikov’s tortured mental state. She urges him to turn himself in and unburden his soul by confessing.
Raskolnikov finally confesses to the police and receives a relatively short eight-year sentence in a Siberian prison.
Sonya has fallen in love with Raskolnikov, so she follows him to Siberia.
However, Raskolnikov initially rejects her love because he can’t accept responsibility for the murder he committed. After spending time in prison, he begins to genuinely repent of his crime and accept Sonya’s love.
Crime and Punishment Characters
Unlike Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, whose cast of characters ranges from street people to royalty, Dostoyevsky’s grim novel focuses on a few impoverished families.
Here are some of the major characters you'll come across:
Raskolnikov
Raskolnikov is a cynical young man who has been driven to distraction by the suffering he witnesses.
He becomes possessed by the idea that morality is nothing more than social convention and that great men can disregard the rules of good and evil.
As one of the most opaque protagonists in literature, Raskolnikov’s motivations are unclear even to himself. He isn’t sure if he commits murder out of financial desperation, a desire to prove that he can ignore moral rules, or both.
Although Raskolnikov tries to act superior to everyone around him, he can’t suppress his human compassion. He’s impulsively generous and kind, as when he gives away his last few rubles to the drunkard’s impoverished family.
Throughout the novel, Raskolnikov is torn between love of his family, selfishness, desire for moral goodness, and bitterness towards the world. He resolutely rejects redemption until the very end, when he finally comes to accept that he is guilty of a horrible act.
Dunya
Raskolnikov’s sister is a good-hearted and beautiful woman. Their family’s poverty has pressured her into agreeing to marry an unsavory suitor for money.
However, when her fiancé turns nasty towards her, she breaks up with him (with Raskolnikov’s support).
One of Dunya’s former suitors, Svidrigailov, discovers that Raskolnikov is the murderer that the police are looking for and tries to force Dunya to sleep with him to buy his silence.
When Dunya refuses, he repents of his selfish womanizing. To make up for it, Svidrigailov gives Dunya enough money to live comfortably so she can be free from the pressure to enter a bad marriage.
Marmeladov
Marmeladov is an alcoholic who has spent all his family’s money on his drinking habit.
As a result, Marmeladov’s wife has forced their daughter Sonya to work as a prostitute to support her younger siblings.
Marmeladov only appears at the beginning of the novel before being hit by a carriage and dying in the street. Raskolnikov overhears his dying cry for Sonya to forgive him, which causes him to seek her out.
Sonya
Shy, unassuming, and innocent, Sonya reluctantly enters prostitution for her family’s sake. However, she maintains her faith in God, believing that He is with her in her suffering.
Sonya is kind and compassionate. She had even befriended the pawnbroker’s handicapped sister, whom Raskolnikov murdered.
However, she still has compassion for Raskolnikov’s spiritual anguish and teaches him to confess his actions so that he can release his moral burden.
After her father’s death, Sonya’s mother loses her mind and dies, leaving Sonya to support her younger siblings. However, the repentant Svidrigailov witnesses her plight and covers the cost of the funeral as well as placing the children in a good orphanage.
Sonya’s persistent love for Raskolnikov allows him to repent of his crime. Dostoyevsky uses her as a figure of God’s love for the sinner Raskolnikov.
Razumikhin
Razumikhin is Raskolnikov’s friend from law school who remains loyal to him and supports him in times of need.
Razumikhin is a naive, yet morally sound character. He genuinely likes and believes in Raskolnikov, and his friendship gives Raskolnikov moral strength.
When Dunya is financially free, she marries Razumikhin and the two live happily together.
What Is the Main Message of Crime and Punishment?
Dostoyevsky wrote Crime and Punishment to challenge the revolutionary philosophies that were beginning to fester in Russia’s economic collapse.
Trapped in poverty and hopelessness, many young Russians eagerly grasped the same ideas that Raskolnikov did: utilitarianism (eliminating the moral consequences of actions and only regarding their practical outcomes) and rationalism (ignoring moral conviction in favor of abstract logic).
Together, these two philosophies convinced many Russians that good and evil did not exist, encouraging them to rebel against their culture’s traditional moral code.
Dostoyevsky addresses this problem by writing a novel to show that morality is more than an arbitrary social convention.
Dostoyevsky calls his novel Crime and Punishment, but the legal aspect of punishment isn’t the focus of the story.
(In fact, the police fumble the whole investigation completely. They suspect Raskolnikov at first but fail to convict him. When he finally confesses, they don’t believe him, and end up giving him a lighter sentence than he deserves!)
Dostoyevsky portrays the agents of human law as incompetent to show that they’re hardly worth rebelling against.
Instead, the story focuses on the spiritual anguish Raskolnikov endures after killing the old woman.
Dostoyevsky is saying that morality isn’t a matter of manmade laws. It comes from a much deeper law: our own humanity.
Even though he could have escaped legal punishment, Raskolnikov couldn’t escape from the moral repercussions of his actions. By rejecting his conscience, Raskolnikov felt cut off from everyone around him, unable to love his family, and exiled from society.
In fact, the name “Raskolnikov” in Crime and Punishment means “severed” or “cut off.” Raskolnikov’s moral crime leaves him cut off from others as well as his own humanity.
His isolation begins to heal when he confesses his crime, acknowledges his guilt, and accepts Sonya’s love.
Dostoyevsky’s main message in Crime and Punishment is to show that violating your conscience is its own punishment. Utilitarianism - trying to ignore the moral weight of your actions - will always backfire, because the harder you try to evade your conscience, the more it makes you suffer.
Themes in Crime and Punishment
Global Events vs Personal Morality
Like Anna Karenina, Crime and Punishment is a warning about what happens when two worlds collide.
Unstable politics and an economic downturn drove Russian peasants into cities - and straight into despair and poverty.
But Dostoyevsky wasn’t concerned with politics on their own. Instead, he saw that a frightening political and social landscape concocted a climate of despair, which led Russia’s young adults to reject traditional morality.
Dostoyevsky is warning us that abstract economic and political pressures have real, personal, visceral consequences.
We’ve all heard about supply chain shortages and the world events causing them. We know what it looks like to see empty shelves in every supermarket.
But have we thought about how it all impacts us - in a gut-deep, spiritual way?
As our world gets less stable, we’re more tempted to buy into a “desperate times call for desperate measures” mentality.
When it feels like you’re caught up in events bigger than you are, will you throw your conscience out the window?
In Crime and Punishment, Dostoyevsky warns you not to. Not just because it’s the right thing to do, but because ignoring your conscience will only harm you.
Despair vs Redemption
Raskolnikov’s final rebellion is to try and resist forgiveness. He holds out against confession and redemption for as long as he can.
At the same time, other characters reject redemption completely. For instance, Svidrigailov is so overcome by self-loathing that he finally kills himself.
Dostoyevsky paints Raskolnikov as an unlikeable, nasty sinner who seems like he’s gone too far to turn back. As readers, we have to face the fact that if someone like Raskolnikov can find redemption, anyone can.
That’s a hard lesson to apply in real life - especially when you look at your nasty boss, an off-putting family member, or an acquaintance you can’t help cringing at.
It can even be tempting to despair of your own redemption when you hit a new low. How many times have you said, “I’ll never change,” “I might as well stop trying,” and “what’s the point?”
Crime and Punishment shows us the messiest, ugliest, unlikeliest path to redemption possible. No matter how messy your own life gets, after reading Raskolnikov’s story, can you really give up on yourself - or anyone else?
Crime, Punishment, and More
In Crime and Punishment, Dostoyevsky gives us an incomparable look into how horrible, yet how good, human beings can be.
It might be one of the most illuminating visions of human nature that literature has to offer. That’s what makes Crime and Punishment a true classic.
Thankfully, other classics are just as illuminating - and many are far less depressing!
Time after time, I turn back to the lessons of Shakespeare’s plays to gain wisdom about the world we live in today. (And if you need an upbeat antidote to Crime and Punishment’s gloomy atmosphere, I recommend checking out some of his fan favorite comedies like Much Ado About Nothing!)
Want a head start on unpacking the wisdom of the Bard? That’s exactly why I wrote an ebook for you.
Click this link to get your free copy of The Bard and the Bees: What Shakespeare taught me about sex, evil, and life in our modern world.
I hope you enjoy unpacking all the great lessons that the classics have in store for you. Until next time,
Evan