Crime and Punishment: Novel by Fyodor Dostoevsky

‘If a man has a conscience, he will suffer for his mistake, that will be his punishment as well as his prison.' You are going to read the novel description on the masterpiece of Fyodor Dostoyevsky, the greatest novel of the 19th century "Crime and Punishment". This novel deals with a young man who is plagued with regrets and paranoia after killing someone.

The bestseller follows Rodion Raskolnikov, a former student in Saint Petersburg who compiles a master-plan to murder a lady for her money. Raskolnikov, an impecunious and desperate former student, wanders through the ghettos of St Petersburg and commits a random murder without penitence or regret. He pictures himself to be an excellent man, a Napoleon: behaving for some kind of better purpose beyond the conventional ethical law. But as he turns his hand on a perilious game of cat and mouse with a skeptical police investigator, Raskolnikov is consumed by the proliferating voice of his conscience and in just a short time after the crime, Raskolnikov is plagued with regret, paranoia, visions, and finds the noose of his own guilt tightening around his neck. Everything is in someway, always warped and justified in a positive brilliance. Even murder. But hey! There’s always something which will bolt from the blue, am I right? Only Sonya, a downtrodden gigolo, can proffer the prospect of redemption.

Alienation is the prime theme of Crime and Punishment. At first, Raskolnikov’s self-image separates him from society. He sees himself as supercilious to every other people and so cannot relate to anyone. Within his personal philosophy, he sees all other people as tools and uses them for his own closure. After committing the assassinations, his solitude grows because of his acute guilt and the half-delirium into which his guilt hurls him.

The way in which the novel inscribes crime and punishment is not exactly what one would expect. The crime is perpetrated in Part I and the punishment comes hundreds of versos later, in the Epilogue. The real hot-spot of the bestseller is not on those two endpoints but on what lies between them—an in-depth inquisition of the frame-of-mind of a criminal. The inner world of Raskolnikov, with all of its doubts, deliria, second-guessing, fright, and despair, is the kernel of the story. Dostoevsky concerns himself not with the actual boomerang of the murder but with the way the killing forces Raskolnikov to deal with tormenting guilt. Indeed, by focusing so little on Raskolnikov’s penal servitude, Dostoevsky seems to suggest that actual retribution is much less terrible than the stress and anxiety of trying to avoid it. Porfiry Petrovich weighs the psychological stand-point of the novel, as he hard-headedly realizes that Raskolnikov is the killer and makes several speeches in which he lists the workings of Raskolnikov’s mind after the murder. Because he understands that a guilt-ridden criminal must undoubtedly experience mental torture, he is certain that Raskolnikov will in the end confess or go mad. The expert mind games that he plays with Raskolnikov underpins the sense that the novel’s aftermath is inevitable due to the character of the human psyche.

Dostoevsky asserted the bad should be punished. If the bad are not captured, they’ll seek out their own punishment, one way or another. At least some punishment is swift. And some punishment will never terminate.