The Criminal Mind: A Review of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s “Crime and Punishment

ByPeter Joeseph 'Briefcase Maker' Kalafatis
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Crime and Punishment: A Murder Told From the Inside

Raskolnikov decides to kill a pawnbroker long before the reader learns much else about him, and by the end of the first part she is dead, along with her half-sister, who walked in at the wrong moment. Dostoevsky never hides the culprit. What he cares about is the aftermath: what happens to a man who believed he had the right, and then finds out he doesn’t. The novel appeared in 1866, and it is still the book people reach for when they want a crime story that is really an argument. What follows covers how it got written, what it argues, where critics have fought over it, how it has fared on screen, and which edition to buy.

Where the Book Came From

Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821–1881) wrote it broke. He owed large debts and was trying to support the family of his late brother Mikhail, and the novel began as something smaller. He first offered a story, a novella. By November 1865, his letters show it had grown into a novel. He reportedly burned an early draft, though the biographer Joseph Frank says he reused parts of it (Wikipedia).

The deal that paid for it was a gamble too. Mikhail Katkov’s The Russian Messenger was a prestigious journal, and Dostoevsky had never published in it. At the same time he was under contract to finish The Gambler for the publisher Fyodor Stellovsky, on punishing terms. A stenographer named Anna Snitkina helped him get both done; she later became his wife. Crime and Punishment ran in twelve monthly installments, January through December 1866, and came out as a book the following year (Cambridge University Library exhibition).

Behind all of it sat 1849. Dostoevsky was arrested that year for sedition over his ties to a socialist discussion circle, spent four years at hard labour in Siberia, and then served several more years in exile before returning to St Petersburg in the late 1850s. An Oxford University Press essay argues that those years among convicts gave him his sense of how a criminal mind actually behaves, which is why Raskolnikov comes across as inept and haunted rather than coldly brilliant (OUP Blog).

The Plot, Briefly

Rodion Raskolnikov is a poor former law student in St Petersburg. He plans to murder and rob Alyona Ivanovna, a pawnbroker. He kills her, and then her half-sister Lizaveta, who arrives during the crime. Guilt and paranoia take over from there.

St Petersburg canal street at dusk with a lone figure under a gas lamp

The people around him pull at him in different directions. Sonya Marmeladova, pushed into prostitution by her family’s poverty. His sister Dunya, and the lawyer Luzhin who courts her. The amoral Svidrigailov. And Porfiry Petrovich, the detective, who never accuses him of anything and is far more frightening for it. (Spoiler: Raskolnikov confesses, is sentenced to eight years of penal servitude, and Sonya follows him to Siberia.)

The Theory That Justifies It

Raskolnikov believes he is an extraordinary person, someone entitled to take on the burden of using evil means for humanitarian ends. That is Britannica’s summary of the idea, and the same article calls the novel “one of the finest studies of the psychopathology of guilt written in any language” (Britannica).

The model in his head is Napoleon. Gary Rosenshield, writing in Dostoevsky Studies in 2020, reads the novel as a critique of the Napoleon myth itself: Raskolnikov sincerely endorses the case for the great man, while Dostoevsky, the implied author, undercuts it through irony (Dostoevsky Studies, vol. 23). Critics have also long read the book as a rebuttal to Russian radicalism, utilitarianism and rationalism, especially the ideas associated with Nikolai Chernyshevsky (Wikipedia).

This is why the book isn’t a whodunit. The reader knows who did it from the first part. The tension is whether the idea survives contact with what he actually did.

The Theory Fails on Contact

It doesn’t survive. Raskolnikov is feverish, sick, and unable to behave like the man his theory describes. The shift comes in the scene where he finally tells Sonya, and the line that gives the game away is not about the pawnbroker at all:

“Did I murder the old woman? I murdered myself, not her!”

— Raskolnikov to Sonya, Part V, Chapter IV (text at americanliterature.com)

The critic Edward Wasiolek described the novel’s shape as a flattened X: a rational Raskolnikov in Parts I–III, a humble and irrational one in Parts IV–VI (Wikipedia). The city does some of the work. St Petersburg, built at enormous human cost on one man’s will, is a fitting backdrop for a story about ideas overriding lives. Dostoevsky’s narrator in Notes from Underground calls it “the most abstract and premeditated city in the whole wide world,” a line the OUP essay uses to make exactly that point.

Nikolai Berdyaev put the book’s meaning in a phrase that has stuck to it ever since:

“the suicide of man by self-affirmation”

— Nikolai Berdyaev, as cited on Wikipedia

Watch: Thug Notes on Crime and Punishment

Wisecrack’s Thug Notes series, hosted by Sparky Sweets, Ph.D., began in 2013 with this very book as its pilot episode, so it’s an obvious place to start if you want the plot at speed (Wikipedia: Thug Notes).

What Critics Have Said

Reaction began almost at once. Nikolay Strakhov remembered it as the literary sensation of 1866, and wrote that it was neither mockery of the younger generation nor a reproach, but a lament over it. The radical critic Dmitry Pisarev saw Raskolnikov as a product of poverty and environment. Vladimir Solovyov read the central idea as self-idolatry that only inner renunciation could cure. Freud admired Dostoevsky, and Sartre and Camus acknowledged his influence (Wikipedia). Nietzsche, in Twilight of the Idols, called him “the only psychologist from whom I had something to learn,” a remark about the author rather than this one book (UBC wiki).

Cramped attic room with an iron bed and a cracked washbasin

In the Soviet Union, interpretation was largely restricted. One notable exception was Mikhail Bakhtin, whose dialogical reading treated the novel as a clash of competing voices rather than a lesson.

Dostoevsky is also having a moment with younger readers: Britannica notes that his novella White Nights gained popularity on TikTok and Instagram in 2024–25.

The Case Against

Not everyone is satisfied, and the objections are worth hearing. The Epilogue is the most disputed part of the book. Bakhtin considered it a blemish. Steven Cassedy argues the opposite: the novel combines classical tragedy with a Christian resurrection story, and the resurrection needs the Epilogue (Wikipedia). Whether Raskolnikov’s turn at the end feels earned or tacked on is a fair argument, and readers land on both sides.

The other complaint is plainer. It’s long. The Vintage Classics edition runs 564 pages, according to Open Library, and much of the middle is conversation and fever rather than event. Readers who want plot momentum will feel the weight of Parts II and IV. Readers who want to be inside a mind under pressure will not.

On Screen

Wikipedia counts more than 30 screen adaptations. A few that matter: Robert Wiene’s German film Raskolnikow (1923); a 1935 American film with Peter Lorre as Raskolnikov; Lev Kulidzhanov’s two-part Soviet film, with Georgy Taratorkin as Raskolnikov and Innokenty Smoktunovsky as Porfiry, produced by Gorky Film Studio (Wikipedia)); a BBC serial from 1979 with John Hurt; and Aki Kaurismäki’s Rikos ja Rangaistus (1983), which moves the story to modern-day Helsinki (Film adaptations of Crime and Punishment). Robert Bresson’s Pickpocket (1959) sits on the same list as a film inspired by it rather than adapted from it.

Choosing a Translation

This matters more than people expect. Wikipedia lists translations from Frederick Whishaw (1885) and Constance Garnett (1914) through Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (1992), Oliver Ready (2014) and Roger Cockrell (2022). The Substack writer Cams Campbell compared eight of them side by side in a 2024 project and is openly skeptical of Garnett’s version, citing a critic’s argument that her prose flattens the distinct styles of Russian writers (Cams Campbell Reads). Campbell lays out excerpts from each chapter in a shared spreadsheet, which makes it easy to sample before you buy.

Black-and-white interrogation room scene with two men across a plain table

Frequently Asked Questions

What is Crime and Punishment about?
A poor former student, Raskolnikov, murders a pawnbroker and her half-sister, convinced that an extraordinary man has the right to do so, and the novel follows the collapse of that conviction.

Is it a mystery?
Not in the usual sense. The reader knows the killer from the first part, and the detective, Porfiry Petrovich, works on Raskolnikov’s conscience rather than hunting for clues. The OUP essay ties the detective element to the rise of detective fiction after Russia’s judicial reforms.

How does it end?
Raskolnikov confesses and is sentenced to eight years of penal servitude. Sonya follows him to Siberia.

Is it free to read online?
The book was published in 1866, and an English translation is available through Project Gutenberg. Most modern translations are still under copyright, so check which one you are getting.

Why does Napoleon keep coming up?
Raskolnikov’s theory of extraordinary men is built on the Napoleon myth, and Rosenshield’s article argues that the book is partly a critique of it.

Where to Read It

Crime and Punishment, Vintage Classics edition (affiliate link): the paperback the button at the top points to, listed on Open Library as the first Vintage Classics edition, March 1993, 564 pages.

Further Reading

Sources

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