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Crime and Punishment

1956 Random House printing of Crime and Punishment, translated by Constance Garnett
Author	Fyodor Dostoevsky
Original title	Преступленіе и наказаніе
Language	Russian
Genre	Literary fiction
Publisher	The Russian Messenger (series)
Publication date	1866; separate edition 1867
OCLC	26399697
Dewey Decimal	891.73/3 20
LC Class	PG3326 .P7 1993
Translation	Crime and Punishment at Wikisource

Crime and Punishment (pre-reform Russian: Преступленіе и наказаніе; post-reform Russian: Преступление и наказание, tr. Prestupléniye i nakazániye, IPA: [prʲɪstʊˈplʲenʲɪje ɪ nəkɐˈzanʲɪje]) is a novel by the Russian author Fyodor Dostoevsky. It was first published in the literary journal The Russian Messenger in twelve monthly installments during 1866. It was later published in a single volume. It is the second of Dostoevsky's full-length novels following his return from ten years of exile in Siberia. Crime and Punishment is considered the first great novel of his mature period of writingand is often cited as one of the greatest works of world literature.

Crime and Punishment follows the mental anguish and moral dilemmas of Rodion Raskolnikov, an impoverished ex-student in Saint Petersburg who plans to kill an unscrupulous pawnbroker, an old woman who stores money and valuable objects in her flat. He theorises that with the money he could liberate himself from poverty and go on to perform great deeds, and seeks to convince himself that certain crimes are justifiable if they are committed in order to remove obstacles to the higher goals of 'extraordinary' men. Once the deed is done, however, he finds himself racked with confusion, paranoia, and disgust. His theoretical justifications lose all their power as he struggles with guilt and horror and confronts both the internal and external consequences of his deed.

Background

At the time Dostoevsky owed large sums of money to creditors and was trying to help the family of his brother Mikhail, who had died in early 1864. After appeals elsewhere failed, Dostoevsky turned as a last resort to the publisher Mikhail Katkov and sought an advance on a proposed contribution. He offered his story or novella (at the time he was not thinking of a novel) for publication in Katkov's monthly journal The Russian Messenger—a prestigious publication of its kind, and the outlet for both Ivan Turgenev and Leo Tolstoy. Dostoevsky, having been engaged in polemical debates with Katkov in the early 1860s, had never published anything in its pages before. In a letter to Katkov written in September 1865, Dostoevsky explained to him that the work was to be about a young man who yields to "certain strange, 'unfinished' ideas, yet floating in the air". He planned to explore the moral and psychological dangers of the ideology of "radicalism", and felt that the project would appeal to the conservative Katkov. In letters written in November 1865 an important conceptual change occurred: the "story" had become a "novel". From then on, Crime and Punishment is referred to as a novel.

In the complete edition of Dostoevsky's writings published in the Soviet Union, the editors reassembled the writer's notebooks for Crime and Punishment in a sequence roughly corresponding to the various stages of composition. As a result, there exists a fragmentary working draft of the novella, as initially conceived, as well as two other versions of the text. These have been distinguished as the Wiesbaden edition, the Petersburg edition, and the final plan, involving the shift from a first-person narrator to Dostoevsky's innovative use of third-person narrative to achieve first-person narrative perspectives. Dostoevsky initially considered four first-person plans: a memoir written by Raskolnikov, his confession recorded eight days after the murder, his diary begun five days after the murder, and a mixed form in which the first half was in the form of a memoir, and the second half in the form of a diary. The Wiesbaden edition concentrates entirely on the moral and psychological reactions of the narrator after the murder. It coincides roughly with the story that Dostoevsky described in his letter to Katkov and, written in the form of a diary or journal, corresponds to what eventually became part 2 of the finished work.

Why Dostoevsky abandoned his initial version remains a matter of speculation. According to Joseph Frank, "one possibility is that his protagonist began to develop beyond the boundaries in which he had first been conceived". The notebooks indicate that Dostoevsky became aware of the emergence of new aspects of Raskolnikov's character as the plot developed, and he structured the novel in conformity with this "metamorphosis". The final version of Crime and Punishment came into being only when, in November 1865, Dostoevsky decided to recast his novel in the third person. This shift was the culmination of a long struggle, present through all the early stages of composition. Once having decided, Dostoevsky began to rewrite from scratch and was able to easily integrate sections of the early manuscript into the final text. Frank says that he did not, as he told Wrangel, burn everything he had written earlier.

Dostoevsky was under great pressure to finish Crime and Punishment on time, as he was simultaneously contracted to finish The Gambler for Stellovsky, who had imposed extremely harsh conditions. Anna Snitkina, a stenographer who later became Dostoevsky's wife, was of great help to him during this difficult task. The first part of Crime and Punishment appeared in the January 1866 issue of The Russian Messenger, and the last one was published in December 1866.

Characters

Structure

The novel is divided into six parts, with an epilogue. The notion of "intrinsic duality" in Crime and Punishment has been commented upon, with the suggestion that there is a degree of symmetry to the book. Edward Wasiolek, who has argued that Dostoevsky was a skilled craftsman, highly conscious of the formal pattern in his art, has likened the structure of Crime and Punishment to a "flattened X", saying:

Parts I–III [of Crime and Punishment] present the predominantly rational and proud Raskolnikov: Parts IV–VI, the emerging "irrational" and humble Raskolnikov. The first half of the novel shows the progressive death of the first ruling principle of his character; the last half, the progressive birth of the new ruling principle. The point of change comes in the very middle of the novel.

This compositional balance is achieved by means of the symmetrical distribution of certain key episodes throughout the novel's six parts. The recurrence of these episodes in the two halves of the novel, as David Bethea has argued, is organized according to a mirror-like principle, whereby the "left" half of the novel reflects the "right" half.

The seventh part of the novel, the Epilogue, has attracted much attention and controversy. Some of Dostoevsky's critics have criticized the novel's final pages as superfluous, anticlimactic, unworthy of the rest of the work, while others have defended it, offering various schemes that they claim prove its inevitability and necessity.

Style

Crime and Punishment is written from a third-person omniscient perspective. It is told primarily from the point of view of Raskolnikov, but does at times switch to the perspective of other characters such as Svidrigaïlov, Razumikhin, Luzhin, Sonya or Dunya. This narrative technique, which fuses the narrator very closely with the consciousness and point of view of the central characters, was original for its period.

Dostoevsky uses different speech mannerisms and sentences of different length for different characters. Those who use artificial language—Luzhin, for example—are identified as unattractive people. Mrs. Marmeladov's disintegrating mind is reflected in her language. In the original Russian text, the names of the major characters have something of a double meaning, but in translation the subtlety of the Russian language is predominantly lost due to differences in language structure and culture. For example, the original Russian title ("Преступление и наказание") is not the direct equivalent to the English "Crime and Punishment". "Преступление" (Prestupléniye) is literally translated as 'a stepping across'. The physical image of crime as crossing over a barrier or a boundary is lost in translation, as is the religious implication of transgression.

English translations

1. Frederick Whishaw (1885)
2. Constance Garnett (1914)
3. David Magarshack (1951)
4. Princess Alexandra Kropotkin (1953)
5. Jessie Coulson (1953)
   1. Revised by George Gibian (Norton Critical Edition, 3 editions – 1964, 1975, and 1989)
6. Michael Scammell (1963)
7. Sidney Monas (1968)
8. Julius Katzer (1985)
9. David McDuff (1991)
10. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (1992)
11. Oliver Ready (2014)
12. Nicolas Pasternak Slater (2017)
13. Michael R. Katz (2017)
14. Roger Cockrell (2022)

The Garnett translation was the dominant translation for more than 80 years after its publication in 1914. Since the 1990s, McDuff and Pevear/Volokhonsky have become its major competitors.

Adaptations

There have been over 25 film adaptations of Crime and Punishment. They include:

• Raskolnikow (aka Crime and Punishment, 1923) directed by Robert Wiene
• Crime and Punishment (1935 American film) starring Peter Lorre, Edward Arnold and Marian Marsh
• Crime and Punishment (1970 film) Soviet film starring Georgi Taratorkin, Tatyana Bedova, Vladimir Basov, Victoria Fyodorova) dir. Lev Kulidzhanov
• Crime and Punishment (1979 TV serial) is a three-part 1979 television serial produced by the BBC, starring John Hurt as Raskolnikov and Timothy West as Porfiry Petrovich.
• Crime and Punishment (1983 film) (original title, Rikos ja Rangaistus), the first movie by the Finnish director Aki Kaurismäki, with Markku Toikka in the lead role. The story has been transplanted to modern-day Helsinki, Finland.
• Without Compassion (1994 Peruvian film) directed by Francisco Lombardi, starring Diego Bertie and Adriana Dávila Franke
• Crime and Punishment in Suburbia (2000), an adaptation set in modern America and "loosely based" on the novel
• Crime and Punishment (2002 film), starring Crispin Glover and Vanessa Redgrave
• Crime and Punishment (2002 TV film) is a 2002 television serial produced by the BBC, starring John Simm as Raskolnikov and Ian McDiarmid as Porfiry Petrovich.
• Crime and Punishment (2007 Russian TV serial) (ru) was a 2007 television serial directed by Dmitry Svetozarov starring Vladimir Koshevoy as Raskolnikov. Aired on Channel One Russia.

See also

In Spanish: Crimen y castigo para niños