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Crime and Punishment · Epilogue

The Resurrection

PrideReasonGuiltCompassion and CharityRedemption

Summary of the part

What changes from one figure to the next: the trial treats Raskolnikov as a clinical case to be explained (momentary madness, poverty, past good deeds), while he himself, inwardly, never accepts that explanation and goes on without regretting the crime, only ashamed of having "failed to hold up." The turn, when it comes, is not born of reasoning: it comes from love for Sofya Semyonovna Marmeladova, in a single instant, and the narrator announces it as the beginning of another story that he refuses to write.

Chapter I: The Trial, the Family, the Letters

Money and WealthReasonGuiltCompassion and Charity

Chapter summary

Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikov has served nine months of hard labor in a Siberian fortress, nearly a year and a half after the crime. At the trial he keeps his testimony accurate, softening nothing. The judges are puzzled that he did not know how much money was in the purse, and psychologists conclude it was a fit of murderous mania. He attributes the crime to poverty and says he gave himself up out of frank remorse. The sentence is mild: his sickly state, the theft he did not profit from, the confession, and the proofs of generosity that Dmitry Prokofich Razumikhin gathers all weigh in his favor. The sentence is eight years of second-category hard labor. His mother, Pulcheria Alexandrovna Raskolnikova, falls ill, and Dunya and Razumikhin take her to a nearby town. Dunya marries Razumikhin, and Pulcheria dies within two weeks, delirious. Sofya Semyonovna Marmeladova writes to Razumikhin every month: he is somber and indifferent, and the last letter says he is in the prison hospital.

Analysis

Dostoevsky served four years of hard labor in the Omsk prison, on the banks of the Irtysh River, and the Epilogue's fortress comes from that experience; the novel's text does not name the city.

At the trial he keeps his testimony firm and accurate, softening nothing in his own favor: he recounts the murder down to the last detail, describes the keys, the trunk, and the wooden box with its metal strip, repeats what he heard when the visitor and the student knocked at the door, and points to the stone in the courtyard where he hid the purse and the objects. The judges find it strange that he hid the loot without using any of it and, even more, that he did not know how much was in the purse (three hundred and seventeen rubles in silver and three twenty-kopeck coins) and even miscounted the objects. Since he confesses everything else frankly, only this point seems a lie.

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Chapter II: Inside the Prison

PrideReasonGuiltCompassion and CharityRedemptionSuffering

Chapter summary

It is not the work, the food, or the shaved head that makes Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikov sick, but wounded pride: he is ashamed, even before Sofya Semyonovna Marmeladova, whom he treats roughly. He does not regret the crime. Among the prisoners he is shunned and then hated without anyone knowing why; they call him "sir," and during a brawl in church they call him an atheist who must be killed, and he waits in silence. Everyone, by contrast, loves Sonia, and the prisoners call her "mother." In the hospital he dreams of a plague in which each infected person believes that only he holds the truth. Convalescing, he waits anxiously for Sonia when she falls ill and does not come. One morning, on the riverbank, she sits beside him, he throws himself at her feet and weeps; she understands that he loves her. They decide to wait out the seven years that remain. Under his pillow is her Gospel. The narrator says a new story begins, but that this account is closed.

Analysis

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Reading of the Part

Analysis

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