A Serialized Novel
Crime and Punishment was serialized in The Russian Messenger, the magazine of Mikhail Katkov, throughout 1866, and the division into parts comes from that: each one closes on a point of tension, because the reader was waiting for the next. Dostoevsky proposed the story to Katkov in September 1865, stuck in a hotel in Wiesbaden with no money after losing at the roulette table, as a short novella about a student who kills a moneylender. It grew until it became the novel, and the book was the most widely read of the year. In April 1866, a former student, Dmitry Karakozov, shot at Tsar Alexander II, and the attack gave the novel a topicality that no one had foreseen.
How the Novel Came to Be
The text went through three versions: a diary in the first person, then a confession narrated from prison and, finally, third-person narration, which never leaves Raskolnikov for a moment and lets him reveal himself gradually, including to himself. The change was not one of style alone: with an outside narrator, whoever questions Raskolnikov's lucidity is questioning a constructed effect, not his own account of himself.
St. Petersburg After the Emancipation
The city of the novel is that of the 1860s, after the emancipation of the serfs in 1861: swollen with people from the countryside, with tenements, taverns, enclosed courtyards and dark staircases. Sennaya Square, the hay market, is the center of this world, and half of the decisive scenes take place within a few blocks of it. Raskolnikov counts seven hundred and thirty steps from his door to the pawnbroker's door.
The 1864 Judicial Reform
Two years before the novel, Russia reformed its justice system: trial by jury, oral proceedings and defense attorneys arrived, and the examining magistrate, a post created in 1860 to investigate before trial, took a place in the new process. Porfiry Petrovich comes out of this figure, and it is through him that the book can have a duel of minds instead of a manhunt.
The Target: Rational Egoism
The novel responds to an idea circulating among young radicals: the rational egoism of Chernyshevsky, set out in What Is to Be Done? of 1863, according to which well-calculated self-interest produces the good of all. It is the doctrine that Luzhin repeats in the drawing room and that Lebezyatnikov caricatures, and Raskolnikov's theory is that doctrine taken to the blood: the arithmetic that trades one life for a hundred.