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Crime and Punishment · Part One

The Crime

Money and WealthPrideReasonGuiltCompassion and Charity

Summary of the part

The thread running through this part is not the crime itself, but the distance between the idea thought through and the body that carries it out. Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikov arrives at the page with the "thing" he has been turning over in his head for a month; the seven chapters show this idea being pushed out of him by three forces that cross without his control: his mother's letter, which gives him a moral motive (to save Dunya from her own sacrifice), the tavern conversation, which gives him a theory (the arithmetic of the greater good), and a chain of coincidences (Lizaveta's schedule, the axe under the bench), which gives him the opportunity. The chapter of the dream of the horse is the hinge: there he weeps with compassion for the mare and swears he cannot bear it, minutes before the "coincidence" closes the trap. Part One ends without Raskolnikov ever having decided to kill with the same will with which he carries out the act.

Chapter I: The Rehearsal

Guilt

Chapter summary

Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikov, a student who dropped out of the university for lack of money, leaves his attic cubicle at the beginning of July, under a suffocating heat, and hurries down the stairs so as not to meet the landlady to whom he owes money: what makes him flee from her is not fear of the demand, it is the revulsion at having to stop, listen, apologize and lie. He is on his way to the house of the pawnbroker Alyona Ivanovna, where he has been once, because he wants to test what he has been turning over for a month as a fantasy. He counts the steps from his door to the old woman's gate (seven hundred and thirty) and is irritated by his tall, torn hat, which any witness would remember later: what occupies him is that a foolish detail could spoil the entire plan.

Analysis

Still in the street, talking to himself, he measures the project against the fear the staircase gave him:

На какое дело хочу покуситься и в то же время каких пустяков боюсь!, What an undertaking I mean to attempt, and at the same time, what trifles I am afraid of!

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Chapter II: Marmeladov

Money and WealthGuiltCompassion and CharitySuffering

Chapter summary

Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikov, who has spent a month running from everyone, suddenly feels a thirst for people and prefers to stay in the basement tavern, despite the filth. A drunken civil servant of more than fifty, of affected speech, addresses him: he is Semyon Zakharovich Marmeladov, a titular councillor, who chooses him because he judges him an educated and sensitive man, when the other customers only laugh at him. He tells how his wife, Katerina Ivanovna Marmeladova, an officer's widow, with three children, consumptive and proud, married him in tears, wringing her hands, because no relative would take her in, and that he lost his job twice.

The daughter of his first marriage, Sofya Semyonovna Marmeladova, went out one afternoon, after her stepmother told her with irony to go, and came back with thirty rubles; today she lives under the yellow ticket, in the house of the tailor Kapernaumov, and helps the family in secret. Marmeladov regained his post five weeks ago and, the day after his first salary, stole the key to his wife's chest and drank for five nights in a row. Today he asked Sonia for money for his hangover, and she gave him her last thirty kopecks.

When the tavern keeper asks what use it is to pity him, Marmeladov asks to be crucified, not pitied. The tavern laughs. Raskolnikov takes him home; Katerina Ivanovna drags him by the hair while he shouts that this gives him pleasure. Raskolnikov leaves on the window, unseen, the copper coins that remain to him and, on the stairs, regrets it. In the street he concludes that the man gets used to everything.

Analysis

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Chapter III: The Mother's Letter

Money and Wealth

Chapter summary

The next day Raskolnikov wakes late, irritated, in the tiny room that looks more like a closet. The maid Nastasya brings him reheated tea and, talking nonstop, warns that the landlady is going to complain about him to the police because he neither pays nor moves out. When she asks what he does all day stretched out, he replies that he works, thinking, and that he wants a whole capital at once, since lessons paid in copper coins solve nothing. She reminds him that a letter arrived the day before, and he sends her away, kisses the envelope and opens it: it is from his mother, Pulcheria Alexandrovna Raskolnikova.

She tells him that his sister, Avdotya Romanovna Raskolnikova, was a governess in the house of Arkady Ivanovich Svidrigailov, took a hundred rubles in advance to send him sixty, and suffered the master's advances, who proposed that they run away together. His wife, Marfa Petrovna, caught them both in the garden, beat Dunya and sent her back in a peasant's cart; the town scorned them for a month, until Svidrigailov repented and his wife read aloud the letter in which Dunya had rejected him. Then Pyotr Petrovich Luzhin, a court councillor of forty-five, asked for Dunya's hand in marriage, and she accepted after a sleepless night. Raskolnikov reads weeping, finishes pale, with a bitter smile, and walks through the city talking to himself.

Analysis

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Chapter IV: Dunya's Calculation

Money and WealthPrideCompassion and Charity

Chapter summary

With the letter still in his head, Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikov decides that the marriage of Avdotya Romanovna Raskolnikova to Pyotr Petrovich Luzhin will not take place as long as he lives. In a soliloquy he takes the letter apart: the fiancé who lets the wife and the mother-in-law travel third class, the mother who resigns herself to living far from her daughter. He concludes that Dunya accepts Luzhin not for interest, but to help her brother and mother, as Sofya Semyonovna Marmeladova sold herself for the family, and that the price, for him, is that he study and become a partner of the fiancé.

On the boulevard he sees a drunk young girl, in a torn dress, and a dandy following her. Furious, he shouts at the man the name of Arkady Ivanovich Svidrigailov as an insult; he calls a guard, explains that the girl was made drunk and deceived, and gives him twenty kopecks. When the girl walks off, with the dandy behind her, he tells the guard to let the man amuse himself, and regrets the twenty kopecks. On the bench he thinks of the word percentage and of Dunya. Then he asks himself where he was going: to Dmitry Prokofich Razumikhin, an old classmate, a cheerful and poor young man who supports himself alone, whom he avoided even in the street.

Analysis

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Chapter V: The Dream of the Horse

ReasonCompassion and Charity

Chapter summary

The idea of going to see his friend, which he postpones mentally until after that business, frightens him: he realizes what he said to himself, asks whether it is really going to happen, and flees the bench. He does not want to go back to the room where the plan ripened, and wanders the islands of the Neva, looking at flowers, carriages and summer houses, until he drinks a glass of vodka, eats a pie and, dizzy, falls into the brush of Petrovsky Island, where he sleeps and has a dream. In the dream he is a seven-year-old boy on a holiday, walking with his father toward the cemetery where his grandmother and a little brother who died are buried; at the door of a tavern, Mikolka, a strong and drunken peasant, hitches a thin mare to a heavy cart and calls everyone to climb aboard, because he will make her run; when she cannot, he beats her with the whip, then with the cart pole and, finally, with an iron bar, until she dies, while the boy runs among the adults, cries, tries to protect her and is pulled away by his father (it is a drunkards' affair, none of our business). The close of the scene is the boy's gesture before the animal already dead:

Analysis

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Chapter VI: The Theory and the Preparation

Money and WealthReason

Chapter summary

The narrator tells what Raskolnikov learned later: the pair of merchants he overheard in Sennaya Square had invited Lizaveta to sell the clothes of an impoverished family, and he, superstitious, saw a sign in it, as in what he had heard six weeks earlier, when leaving the old woman's house, where he had left his sister's gold ring. In a little tavern, a student had told an officer that the pawnbroker, rich and pitiless, mistreated her sister, who is pregnant, and had disinherited her in favor of a monastery, and that he would kill her without remorse, since one death would pay for a hundred lives; but when the officer asked whether he himself would kill her, he answered no.

On the day of the crime, Raskolnikov wakes late, eats little and dreams of an African oasis; at the sound of a clock he leaps up: it is almost time. He sews a loop inside his coat to hang the axe, prepares the false pledge, a board and a strip of iron wrapped together, and goes down the thirteen steps. He meant to take the axe from the landlady's kitchen, but Nastasya is there; so he sees an axe under the porter's bench, where the porter is absent, and fastens it to the loop. Past ten past seven, he reaches the building by the other side, climbs without meeting anyone and rings the bell three times, until he hears the bolt being lifted.

Analysis

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Chapter VII: The Crime

Money and WealthReasonGuilt

Chapter summary

The door opens a crack, and Raskolnikov enters the room without an invitation. He tells the old woman he has brought the pledge, and when she turns to the window to undo the knot of the wrapping, he pulls the axe from the loop and strikes her head with the blunt side; two more blows kill her. He takes the bunch of keys from her pocket, cuts the cord with two crosses from her neck, opens the trunk under the bed, and fills his pockets with jewels. He hears a sound in the other room: Lizaveta, who has come back ahead of time, is standing before her dead sister. She steps back without screaming, raises her arm as if to ward him off, and he kills her with the edge of the axe.

He washes his hands and the axe and realizes that the stairway door has been open all along. He locks it; he hears footsteps coming up: a heavyset visitor, Kokh, and a young man notice that the door is bolted from the inside, and the young man goes down to fetch the porter. Raskolnikov unlocks it, goes out, and hides in the empty second-floor apartment, where painters have left the door open, until the footsteps pass; then he returns the axe to the porter's bench, goes up to his room, and throws himself on the sofa, without sleeping.

Analysis

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Reading of the Part

Analysis

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