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It is precisely this opening up of
the protagonist’s mind to the reader
that secured the book’s status as
one of the most important and
influential literary works to emerge
in the 19th century.
Crime and Punishment opens
on a “hot evening early in July” in
St. Petersburg, Russia. Raskolnikov,
a shabbily dressed young man, steps
from his tiny, attic apartment, skips
past his landlady, and slips away
into the heat and the stench of the
city. He is ill and also suffering from
some form of mental dislocation. He
mutters to himself. He is hungry.
He walks the streets, disturbed by
the presence of others. The reader
is drawn ever closer to his innermost
thoughts, fears, and anxieties.
Raskolnikov is poor, and this
motif of poverty is pervasive in the
text. The reader wanders with him,
seeing with his eyes a city that is
striving to survive—a place in
which many struggle against
hunger and mental torment.Inner conflicts
Dostoyevsky inserts a variety of
colorful and brilliantly observed
characters into the narrative, as
seen through Raskolnikov’s eyes.
He ventures to the house of Alyona
Ivanovna, a local pawnbroker, “a
diminutive, withered up old woman
of sixty, with sharp malignant eyes
and a sharp little nose.”
Raskolnikov has come to pawn his
father’s watch and, poverty
stricken, he is forced to accept a
pitiful sum for it. As he leaves theapartment block, a thought enters
his mind. He stops on the stairs,
shocked at himself, and once back
on the crowded streets, he walks as
though in a dream, “regardless of
the passersby, and jostling against
them,” until he finds himself by a
flight of steps leading down into a
tavern. Although he has never been
into a tavern before, he enters and
orders a beer, and immediately
“he felt easier; and his thoughts
became clear.” But Dostoyevsky
informs the reader that Raskolnikov
is far from well, because “even at
that moment he had a dim
foreboding that this happier frame
of mind was also not normal.”
He has a conversation with a
drunken man, Marmeladov, who
tells a pitiful story of poverty and
his daughter’s prostitution, bothbrought about by his alcoholism.
Marmeladov acknowledges his vice
and reveals that he is confessing
this to Raskolnikov, a chance
encounter, rather than the regular
patrons, because in his face he
can read “some trouble of mind.” ❯❯See also: The Tale of Genji 47 ■ The Princess of Cleves 104 ■ Madame Bovary 158– 63 ■ Middlemarch 182–83 ■
The Portrait of a Lady 186–87DEPICTING REAL LIFE
Summertime in St. Petersburg is
the setting for Crime and Punishment.
The crowded, stifling conditions in
the city mirror the troubled student
Raskolnikov’s feverish inner drama.Only to live, to live and live!
Life, whatever it may be!
Crime and
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