Crime and Punishment

The theory, and where it came from

The murder is a test of an idea. In Part III, Porfiry sums up Raskolnikov's article for him: men are divided into ordinary and extraordinary, and the extraordinary have a right to commit any crime. Raskolnikov corrects him only slightly. Napoleon is his example throughout. Near the end of Part V he tells Sonya that he wanted to become a Napoleon, and that this is why he killed the pawnbroker.

Part of the idea came from Paris. In March 1865 Napoleon III, the emperor of the French, published a Life of Julius Caesar. In its preface he argued that exceptional men have a right to break the moral rules that bind everyone else. The book was quickly known in Russia and argued over in the Russian press. The editors of the Russian academic edition of Dostoevsky name that preface as one of the sources of Raskolnikov's theory.

The germ is older than the book. In September 1863 Dostoevsky was travelling in Italy with Apollinaria Suslova. Her diary records a dinner in Turin where he watched a little girl at her lessons and said something like this: imagine such a girl with an old man, and suddenly some Napoleon says, destroy the whole town. Things have always been like that in the world, he added.

Two Paris murders and a Balzac student

Dostoevsky read French crime closely. Vremya, the magazine he ran with his brother Mikhail in the early 1860s, printed reports of famous French trials of the 1830s to the 1850s. One was the trial of Pierre-François Lacenaire, a Paris murderer who tried to justify his killings as a matter of principle. Dostoevsky added a note to the report. Cases like this, he wrote, are more gripping than any novel, because they light up dark sides of the human soul that art prefers not to touch.

The scholars also connect the novel to a Paris book, Balzac's Père Goriot. In that novel the student Rastignac asks his friend Bianchon a question. If you could get a million by willing the death of an old mandarin in China, without leaving Paris, would you do it? Bianchon says no. Dostoevsky remembered the scene well enough to retell it in a draft of his 1880 speech on Pushkin, where he called the refusal the French student's answer.

Sonya, and the reading of Lazarus

Sonya Marmeladova is the book's answer to Raskolnikov's theory, and she never argues with it. She is eighteen, sells herself so her stepmother and the small children can eat, and reads the Gospels. Raskolnikov goes to her room and makes her read aloud the story of Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead. Later he confesses to her there, and she tells him to go and kiss the earth at a crossroads.

The epilogue brings the Lazarus reading back. In the prison hospital Raskolnikov keeps Sonya's New Testament under his pillow, the same book she read from. He has not yet opened it. He only wonders whether her convictions could now be his. Dostoevsky stops the novel there, before any conversion is shown, and says the renewal of a man would be the subject of a new story.

Crime and Punishment in Paris

French readers got the complete novel in 1884. Plon, the Paris publisher, issued Victor Derély's translation that year as Le Crime et le châtiment, in two small volumes. The Russian academic edition lists 1884 as the year of the full French translation. English readers waited until 1886.

The first stage version outside Russia opened in Paris, at the Théâtre de l'Odéon, on 15 September 1888. Paul Ginisty and Hugues Le Roux wrote it as a drama in seven scenes, and Paul Mounet played Raskolnikov under the name Rodion. The play text was printed in Paris the same year, and an engraving of the production appeared in Le Théâtre illustré. Both are in the Bibliothèque nationale de France.