Crime and Punishment takes place in St. Petersburg, then the capital of Russia, in a July of stifling heat in the mid-1860s, and the final stretch unfolds in a Siberian prison, nearly a year and a half after the crime.
The action centers on Sennaya Square, the hay market, the poorest neighborhood of the capital: half of the decisive scenes happen within a radius of a few blocks. Raskolnikov counts seven hundred and thirty steps from his own door to the pawnbroker's. The text abbreviates the names of some streets and bridges, such as a side street S. and a K. bridge, but it names Petersburg.
The setting is the city after the emancipation of the serfs in 1861: swollen with people from the countryside, with tenements, taverns, closed courtyards, and dark staircases. Raskolnikov lives in an attic cubicle, and the narrow, dark service staircase of the old woman's building enters his plan. Two years before the novel, in 1864, Russia reformed its justice system, with juries, oral proceedings, and defense lawyers, and gave weight to the examining magistrate, a role created in 1860 and the one from which Porfiry Petrovich comes. The book was serialized through 1866.
The Epilogue goes to Siberia: a fortress in a town on the banks of a wide, deserted river, where Raskolnikov serves his sentence. The novel does not name the town, but it mentions the Irtysh River in Sonia's letters. The author served four years of hard labor in Omsk, on the banks of that river, and the Epilogue's fortress comes from that experience.