The thing about Raskolnikov is he’s not some cackling villain. He’s brilliant, proud, drowning in theories.
Crime and Punishment doesn’t walk into your life like a story—it crawls under your skin like a fever. From the first pages, it feels sweaty, suffocating, like a long night where you can’t breathe right and every thought you have circles back on itself until it makes you dizzy. Dostoevsky doesn’t just hand you a tale about crime or justice—he throws you into the swamp of one man’s head, Raskolnikov’s head, and dares you to sit with the stench of guilt, pride, and madness. It’s not family chaos this time, not a big village tearing itself apart—it’s one man, alone, standing over a broken body with an axe in his hand, and realizing that the worst punishment isn’t prison. It’s his own mind refusing to let him rest.
The thing about Raskolnikov is he’s not some cackling villain. He’s brilliant, proud, drowning in theories. He convinces himself that some people are “extraordinary,” above the petty rules of society. Napoleon could kill thousands and still be celebrated, so why shouldn’t he, a starving ex-student in a cramped St. Petersburg room, test his own greatness by murdering one greedy pawnbroker? In his head, it’s almost clean, almost logical—remove one useless parasite, free himself from poverty, prove his superiority.
However, as soon as the axe is thrown, the entire book is different. Raskolnikov is not a bloodthirsty man. He isn’t Napoleon. He is simply a young man whose hands shake and his brain cannot stop talking. He does not merely kill the pawnbroker, he panics, misses his shot, goes on to kill her sister, and then the theory falls apart into a sea of blood, sweat and terror. Since then, the crime becomes practically an incidental thing, the punishment he makes himself bear in his own skull is the story itself.
And oh, the punishment. Dostoevsky takes us step by step through it: the paranoia as he strolls down the street, when he thinks everyone is spying on him; the manic ups and downs between his feeling that he is a great man, and that he cannot do some things, and his feeling that he is filth, and undeserving of a second chance. It is a claustrophobic novel, you are in that small room with him, you are gasping as he gets tighter and tighter around you with the guilt that smokes.
The supporting characters do not simply revolve around him, they are mirrors, shining bits of his soul to the light. There is Sonia, the silent self-sacrificing whoresan, whose devotion and love slice his pride with a razor. She is what he is not, simple, persevering, ready to bear misery with meekness rather than proudly. Whenever they utter a word, you can feel the walls of Raskolnikov shaking, despite his resistance. And there is Porfiry, the detective, who is playing this game of waiting, which is a slow, psychological game, not in pursuit after evidence, but waiting until his conscience collapses on itself. The dialogues there are electric, you can hear the clock running in the head of Raskolnikov.
The fact that guilt in itself was turned into the protagonist is what broke me. It was neither the police, nor the trial, but his own soul eating at his breast. You see him walking the city, talking to himself, pushing his family away, falling asleep, as he is torn down the middle: the other half of you demands it is right, the other part of you pulls him to confessing like a gravestone. It is intolerable, but you cannot tear your eyes off, as Dostoevsky is able to make you feel each pound of that internal conflict.
And when the confession is eventually reached, it does not seem as a victory, it is rather a liberation.
Not clean, not victorious, but needed. As a drowning man who has simply given up struggling and allowed him to support. The physical punishment, which is Siberian prison, is not the most severe suffering. Before it, it is the years of gnawing guilt. However, it all ends with Sonia, with the gradual awakening of humility, a glimmer of something different. Redemption. No great, no easy things--the weak light suffering, should endure could on the contrary make pure.
At the end of Crime and Punishment I was teetering on my feet, as though I had been bearing the fever of another. But it left me myself queerly purged. Since the book whispers this sadistic truth: you can justify everything in theory, but your soul cannot help you to get out of the burden of what you have done. And yet--do you have the strength to endure, do you have the courage to stand squarely to it--there is, after all, though it is a slight chance, that even in punishment, there is the seed of regeneration.
It’s not just a novel. It’s a long, sleepless night in the human conscience, where crime is quick, but punishment never ends.
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