Rodion Raskolnikov lives in a room rented from a landlady. The room is so small, Dostoevsky tells us, that a tall man cannot stand in it without stooping. Raskolnikov, who is tall, has stopped standing. He lies on the sofa. He has not eaten for two days. He has not paid his rent for two months. He has dropped out of law studies at the university for want of funds. He has a mother and a sister in the provinces who are, we will learn, about to sell the sister to the richest local suitor because this is the only way to support Rodion through the rest of his degree.

And Raskolnikov — thin, handsome, hollow-eyed, feverish — has been walking the streets of Petersburg in the terrible July heat, rehearsing in his head an argument. He has written the argument down, some months ago, in an article he got published in a minor journal. The argument is this: history is moved by a small category of extraordinary men who have the right, for the sake of a higher purpose, to transgress the ordinary laws. Napoleon, Muhammad, Newton, Kepler. All of them, Raskolnikov writes, would have had the moral right, in pursuit of their world-altering visions, to kill one or two people and step over the bodies. The ordinary law is for the ordinary man. The extraordinary man is above it.

This is — we need to see it clearly — not a metaphor. Dostoevsky's Raskolnikov is not being intellectual in the ordinary sense. He has worked his argument out on paper, and he is now, in the first chapters of the novel, on his way to apply it. The old pawnbroker woman in the building on the Voznesensky Prospect — Alyona Ivanovna, sixty, wealthy, mean to her younger half-sister, a pawn-dealer of small gold items and silver spoons — is, Raskolnikov has decided, a useless piece of humanity. She cheats her clients. She beats her sister. She hoards. Her money, Raskolnikov has calculated, could educate him, rescue his sister from the suitor, pay his mother's rent, and leave enough over to start a modest career in teaching, thus producing, at a rough calculation, one useful young man to the Russian state for the price of one useless old pawnbroker. He is going to test the theory on her.

The theory is tested. He goes through the preparatory steps. He sews a small loop on the inside of his coat to carry the axe so that his hands will be free. He walks past the old janitor's room where he has noticed the axe lies unwatched and takes it. He mounts the stairs. He rings the bell. The old woman lets him in, suspecting nothing. He has brought a bundle tied up with string, a supposed pawn, a pretext. She turns to examine it under the window. He brings the axe down on the back of her head. She falls.

And then the theory fails. Because the old woman's half-sister Lizaveta, simple, gentle, entirely innocent, whom Raskolnikov had no plan to kill and whom the whole theoretical structure did not cover, walks into the flat at the wrong moment. Raskolnikov, panicked, kills her too. The old janitor's axe, borrowed for one useless piece of humanity, has become the instrument of a second, unplanned death, the death of a mild woman Raskolnikov's theory had expressly declared was the kind of ordinary person whom extraordinary men must never harm.

The novel, from that instant, becomes the story of a young man waking up from his own theory. The whole six hundred pages that follow are the process of his slow, slow admission that the theory was not extraordinary but ordinary, and that he is not Napoleon but a frightened boy who has killed two women on a July afternoon for a handful of small valuables he will not even manage, in the end, to use.

The night before the murder Raskolnikov dreams his childhood. He is seven. He is walking, on a Sunday in summer, with his father, along the road past the tavern on the edge of his home village. A crowd is coming out of the tavern. They are drunk. They have been drinking all day. A man named Mikolka owns a small old horse — a mare, thin, worn out — which is hitched to an enormous cart. He shouts to his drunken friends to climb up. They do: six or seven of them clamber into the cart, laughing. The cart is too heavy for the mare. Mikolka beats her. She tries to move the cart. She cannot. Mikolka is enraged. He gets a heavy iron bar from the tavern. He begins to beat the mare with the bar. He beats her across the back. He beats her across the eyes. The mare goes down in the traces.

Seven-year-old Raskolnikov, in the dream, is watching. He is shrieking. He is pulling at his father. Papa, papa, they are beating the little horse. His father tells him to come away. He will not. He runs into the crowd. He throws himself on the dying mare's neck. He kisses the mare's bloodied head. He screams at Mikolka. Mikolka, drunk, brings the iron bar down a final time. The mare is dead.

Raskolnikov wakes. He is covered in sweat. He is shaking. He lies on his sofa in the stifling Petersburg attic. He thinks clearly, for a moment, about what he is about to do. He says aloud: am I really going to take an axe and split an old woman's head. He says: Lord, show me the way, and I renounce this cursed dream of mine. He is, in that small moment, almost saved.

Dostoevsky gives us the dream for a specific reason. He is showing that Raskolnikov the child, which is to say Raskolnikov before the theory, is a boy who throws himself sobbing on the neck of a beaten horse. The Raskolnikov who is about to raise the axe is not the original Raskolnikov. He is a Raskolnikov who has been slowly constructed, over some months of hunger and pride and a bad book and worse friends, on top of the original. And the dream shows, in one scene, that underneath the theory is still a seven-year-old boy who cannot bear cruelty.

He rises from the sofa. For one clear hour he walks around the room convinced he will not do it. He says: it was a dream, it was only a dream. He begins, the narrator tells us, to feel lighter. He goes out to walk in the evening. He walks, by a chance he cannot quite explain to himself, in the direction of the pawnbroker's house. He learns, as he passes the market, that the old woman's sister Lizaveta will be out of the flat the following evening at seven o'clock. He understands, at that moment, that the opportunity has been given to him. He understands that he is going to take it. The theory, which had wavered, reasserts itself. The seven-year-old boy on the dead mare's neck is put, for a further twenty-four hours, back into a closet. The axe is still in the janitor's room. The old woman is still in her flat.

The dream is the book's deepest single image. All of Crime and Punishment happens on the ground between the child who cannot bear the dying mare and the adult who will pick up the axe for a theoretical reason. Raskolnikov's whole long punishment, across the next five hundred pages, is the slow recovery of the child.

The day before the murder Raskolnikov goes into a tavern. He is thinking, he does not know how to stop thinking. At the next table sits a ruined gentleman in a greenish dress-coat. The man is Semyon Zakharovich Marmeladov. He is a former titular councillor, dismissed long ago from his civil-service post for drinking, now drinking again. He is fifty. He has been drunk for five days running and has not been home. He notices Raskolnikov's face. He wants an audience. He gets one.

And Marmeladov delivers the most extraordinary drunk monologue in nineteenth-century literature. He tells Raskolnikov his whole life in an hour. He tells him about his first wife, who died. He tells him about his second wife Katerina Ivanovna, a proud consumptive woman of better family who married him from desperation and now coughs blood and tries to keep three small children clean on nothing. He tells him about his one grown daughter from the first marriage — Sonya — who, when the household had literally no bread, accepted her stepmother's unspoken suggestion and went out one evening at dusk and came back at dawn with thirty roubles, and has since been registered with the police as a prostitute and is the only income keeping the three younger children alive.

He weeps. He drinks. He tells Raskolnikov, with the drunk's terrible clarity, that he deserves nothing. That his wife has the right to pull his hair — she has just pulled it. That his daughter has the right to despise him. That he has stolen her earnings from under her pillow for vodka and that she handed him the money the next morning without a word. And then — this is the moment by which the monologue is remembered — he says, for every man must at least have somewhere to go. He says: do you understand. Do you understand what it means to have nowhere left to go at all. A man must have at least one place where he is expected. Even if it is only the tavern.

Raskolnikov, the night before the murder, walks Marmeladov home. He sees the family. He sees the consumptive wife coughing. He sees the three small children. He leaves some of his own last small coins on the windowsill — he has no real money, but he leaves what he has — and walks out down the stairs. He thinks: these people are why the old pawnbroker must die. He thinks: I will be able to educate Sonya's siblings. He thinks: I will rescue them with the old woman's money. The theory has found a use for itself.

But Dostoevsky is doing something much harder than Raskolnikov notices. He is introducing, through Marmeladov, the whole cast of witnesses to Raskolnikov's later collapse. Marmeladov will be run over in the street by a drunk driver a few weeks later and will die, in his own room, in front of Raskolnikov. Katerina Ivanovna will follow him to her grave inside a month. Sonya, left with her three orphaned siblings, will be the one person to whom Raskolnikov, at the peak of his collapse, will confess the murder. She will read him the Gospel story of Lazarus by candlelight in her room. She will follow him to Siberia. She is, in the design of the book, the person through whom the whole long recovery is going to be possible.

And it all begins in the tavern, on the night before the axe, with a drunk father telling a stranger that every man must have somewhere, at least somewhere, to go.

The police have searched the building. They have interviewed the landlady. They have brought in suspects. They have released suspects. They have arrested a drunk decorator on whose clothes a drop of blood was found, until it turned out he had cut his own hand. The case is, officially, unresolved. Raskolnikov has been ill. He has been sleeping for days at a stretch. He has been seen in the street walking without knowing where he is. His friend Razumikhin has been taking care of him. His sister and mother have arrived unexpectedly in Petersburg. His life, on the surface, is proceeding.

And a certain Porfiry Petrovich, the chief examining magistrate for the district, has been — for two weeks — beginning to understand what his junior colleagues have not. Porfiry is fat. Porfiry has a soft high voice. Porfiry has an old dressing-gown and a habit of running on about everything except the case he is investigating. He is, as a character in a novel, not a type the reader has seen before. He is not a bulldog detective. He is not a brilliant deducer. He is a middle-aged civil servant who has read a great deal of novels and knows a great deal about human nature, and has noticed — because he has read Raskolnikov's obscure little article about extraordinary men — that one of the young men he has been introduced to in the neighbourhood published, some months ago, precisely the theory that this crime smells of.

Porfiry invites Raskolnikov to his office for a friendly chat. He says he has a question or two, nothing official. Raskolnikov comes. What follows is one of the most famous interrogations in literature. Porfiry does not accuse him. He does not even ask the central questions. He discusses the article. He jokes, gently. He turns and turns again, in long paragraphs, around Raskolnikov's nerves, letting Raskolnikov hear that he has read the article, letting Raskolnikov feel that Porfiry knows more than he has yet said, letting Raskolnikov — this is the crucial point — exhaust himself trying to seem innocent in a room where nobody has yet mentioned the crime.

By the end of the interview Raskolnikov is in a cold sweat. He has said nothing incriminating. He has betrayed nothing. But he has spent two hours in a room in which another man has, without ever saying so, let him understand that he is already caught. Porfiry bows him out. Porfiry says, with perfect friendliness, that they must talk again. Porfiry says: do not worry, Rodion Romanovich, I know you in any case.

Dostoevsky has invented, in Porfiry, a kind of policeman the English detective novel would not arrive at for another sixty years. Porfiry knows. Porfiry also knows that an early arrest will not actually help a young man like Raskolnikov. Porfiry, whose job is officially to obtain a confession and make a conviction, is playing a longer game. He is waiting for Raskolnikov to confess voluntarily, because he has understood — and he tells Raskolnikov so at their second meeting — that for a man of Raskolnikov's type a forced confession will ruin him, whereas a voluntary confession, made after he has arrived at it himself, will be the beginning of his salvation. Porfiry, in a tsarist police uniform, on a civil service pension, is the first father-figure in the book and the closest thing Raskolnikov has to a friend who understands what he is.

Raskolnikov has not confessed. He has been, on the contrary, more and more sure that he must conceal himself to the end. But he finds, in the weeks after Porfiry's first interview, that he cannot be alone with his own thoughts. He seeks out Sonya — the ruined daughter of Marmeladov, who has come to his attention because she nursed her father after the street accident. He has had several conversations with her. He is drawn to her. She is timid, small, very young, in a cheap yellow ticket that marks her profession. She prays. She reads the Gospels every evening. She is, in her small rented room, a kind of light Raskolnikov cannot name.

He comes to her room one evening without any plan. He asks her, abruptly, to read him something from the New Testament. She has a battered book — the copy of the Gospels that her friend Lizaveta, the pawnbroker's half-sister whom Raskolnikov killed, had given her some months before. Sonya does not know this. She does not know Raskolnikov has killed Lizaveta. She takes out Lizaveta's Gospel. She asks: what shall I read. He says: the story of Lazarus.

And Sonya reads to him, in the small room, by the light of a single stub of candle on the small pine table, the eleventh chapter of the Gospel of John. Lazarus is ill. His sisters send for Jesus. Jesus delays. Lazarus dies. Jesus arrives at the grave four days too late. The sisters meet him weeping. He weeps with them. He says: roll away the stone. They object: Lord, by this time he stinketh, he has been dead four days. He says: roll away the stone. They roll it away. He cries: Lazarus, come forth. Lazarus comes out of the grave wrapped in grave-clothes. Jesus says: loose him, and let him go.

Sonya reads the passage through to the end. Her voice at the end has a small tremor in it that Raskolnikov notices and that Sonya does not know she has. Raskolnikov is quiet. He understands, in a way he has not previously admitted, that Sonya is reading the story to him, not to herself. He understands that she is reading the story because she has decided, without yet saying so, that he is Lazarus.

He confesses the next evening. He comes back to her room. He tells her he knows who killed Lizaveta. She stares at him. He asks her to guess. She looks at his face. She understands. She does not recoil. She comes to him, weeps on his shoulder, and tells him he must go to the crossroads — as peasant penitents did — and kiss the ground and say aloud: I am a murderer. He does not do it that night. He will, after much further suffering, do exactly that on a later evening, in a public square, before turning himself in.

Sonya is — and the novel has been arranging this since Marmeladov's monologue — the still centre of the book. She is the one person in Petersburg who has been ruined by worse circumstances than Raskolnikov, has suffered without complaining about it, has gone on loving her family, and has kept a small book under her pillow and read it every evening. She is not the theory's answer. She is the theory's refusal. Everything Raskolnikov has told himself about the rights of the extraordinary man fails, one sentence at a time, in the room of an eighteen-year-old prostitute reading aloud the story of a man called up out of the grave.

Sonya has told him: go to the crossroads, kneel, kiss the earth you have defiled, say aloud, I am a murderer. He has not done it. He has been resisting for days. Porfiry has had a final interview with him — gentle, paternal, offering him a reduced sentence if he will confess voluntarily rather than wait to be arrested. Porfiry has said: Rodion Romanovich, you need air. You need earth. You are suffocating. Go and confess. The confession is the beginning. You will not rebuild a life without it.

The sister's marriage has collapsed. The mother is slipping into a nervous illness. Marmeladov's widow has died. Sonya's three siblings have been taken by a man who will try to abuse them. Svidrigailov — a minor nobleman who has been stalking Raskolnikov's sister and who is arguably the novel's only consistent portrait of evil as ordinary laziness — has rescued the children in the last week of his life and then shot himself at dawn at the Smolny Bridge. The city is emptying of the people around Raskolnikov.

He goes to the Haymarket. It is evening. The market is closing up. The square is wet from the evening rain. Raskolnikov kneels down in the middle of the square. He bends and kisses the dirty cobblestones. He means to say the words. He cannot. Someone in the crowd — a passer-by, a drunk — laughs and says: look at the pilgrim. Someone else says: he's drunk. Someone else says: he's praying for Jerusalem. Raskolnikov, humiliated, cannot bring himself to speak the words aloud. He rises, without saying what he came to say, and walks on.

But the gesture is enough. He has put his lips to the earth. He has knelt in the public square. And now he walks, with a tired certainty that is neither peace nor terror but something in between, to the police station. He comes in. He stands at the counter. He mumbles at the clerk. The clerk does not understand. Raskolnikov clears his throat. He says: it was I who killed the old woman, the official's widow, and her sister Lizaveta with an axe and robbed them. The clerk stares. A junior officer is sent running for the lieutenant. The full confession is taken down in writing.

Raskolnikov is arrested. He is tried. His lawyer, his mother's small capital, his sister's testimony, and the depositions of Razumikhin and Sonya combine to produce a reduced sentence: eight years in Siberian penal servitude, not the twenty he would have otherwise received. His mother, unable to understand what has happened, dies, still believing her son is a great man overseas on government business. His sister marries Razumikhin. They will follow him to Siberia. Sonya will follow him to Siberia. Raskolnikov is taken in chains on the long eastbound road that Dostoevsky himself travelled in 1850 at the age of twenty-eight.

The novel is almost over. What remains is the question no reader can yet answer. Raskolnikov has confessed because the alternative was unbearable. Has he repented. Has he understood. Has the theory actually been defeated. The answer the book gives on these questions is, across the last chapter, much quieter than readers expect.

Raskolnikov has been in Siberia for nine months. He works every day with the other convicts. He is treated, by the other convicts, badly. They do not like him. They do not trust him. He is an educated gentleman and they are peasants; he has no real place at either mess. He is cold all winter. He is ill. He is as far from the interior rebirth Sonya has been promising him as he has ever been.

Sonya has come with him. She lives in the nearest town, walking a few miles each morning to bring him bread and to stand where he can see her from the work-yard. She is patient. She has made friends with the other prisoners and with their families. The prisoners have started calling her Mother. They respect her in a way they do not respect him. It annoys him. He has not yet wept. He has not asked her forgiveness. He has not, the narrator tells us flatly, repented of his crime — only of his failure.

And then, in April, the Siberian spring begins. The river breaks up. He falls ill with a light fever that keeps him in the prison hospital for two weeks. In the hospital he dreams, on the last morning of his illness, a terrible dream: a plague is coming over the whole world, a plague of invisible microbes that, once they enter a man, make him certain that he alone possesses the truth. Under the plague men become incapable of understanding each other. Men begin to kill each other over small disagreements. Cities burn. Armies march. The whole world falls apart because every man is certain, of his own small truth, that he is the extraordinary man.

He wakes from the dream shaken. He knows what the plague is. He knows he has had it. He comes out of the hospital. He goes to the river bank. It is early morning. The prison work-yard is still. He sees Sonya coming across the field from the direction of the town. She is ill. She has been worried about him. She is walking toward him on the muddy path.

And something — the narrator gives it to us in one long plain sentence — breaks in him. He goes to meet her. He kneels at her feet. He takes her hand. He weeps. He has not wept before in the book. He weeps now for some time. She holds him. She does not speak. She knows, at that moment, that what she has been waiting for has happened.

The novel ends a paragraph later. Dostoevsky does not give us a sermon. He does not give us a conversion scene in the theological sense. He gives us a young man on a riverbank in April, weeping for the first time, kneeling at the feet of a girl to whom he has, for two hundred pages, been giving the scraps of his interior life. He says: now at last, love has raised them both from the dead. He says: the heart of one contained endless sources of life for the heart of the other. He says — in the novel's last line — that they have seven more years of his sentence to serve, seven more years, and they will bear them.

This is the book's quietest argument. Crime and Punishment is not a book about a murder. It is a book about a theory and the cost of a theory, and about how long it takes a man who has lived inside a theory to come out of it far enough to kneel on a muddy riverbank and weep. The answer the book gives is: it takes longer than anyone expects. Nine months of Siberian labour, a dream of a plague, a girl walking across a field. And then, on the morning of an April day, a first real tear.