Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment goes beyond asking who committed a murder. It follows the offender's ideas, fears, and moral conflicts in a complex psychological narrative.

Saint Petersburg and the characters' poverty provide its setting. Dialogue and clashes between different views explore responsibility and redemption.

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.

At the end of November much had been written and was ready; I burned it all; I can confess that now. I didn't like it myself. A new form, a new plan excited me, and I started all over again.

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.

I wrote with genuine inspiration, but perhaps it is no good; but for them[,] the question is not its literary worth, they are worried about its morality. Here I was in the right—nothing was against morality, and even quite the contrary, but they saw otherwise and, what's more, saw traces of nihilism... I took it back, and this revision of a large chapter cost me at least three new chapters of work, judging by the effort and the weariness; but I corrected it and gave it back.

Structure

Parts I–III 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.