Who the Hell Was Raskolnikov?
An Explainer on Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment
By Brent Antonson
Few novels peer into the human soul with the raw, surgical precision of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. Published in 1866, it isn’t just about a murder — it’s about the anatomy of guilt. Set in the feverish underbelly of St. Petersburg, the book follows Rodion Raskolnikov, a destitute ex-student who kills an old pawnbroker, believing he’s doing the world a favor. His “theory” is that extraordinary men — the Napoleons of history — are above the law, entitled to commit crimes if it serves a greater purpose. It sounds intellectual on paper. In practice, it tears him apart.
Raskolnikov’s act isn’t driven by greed but by philosophy — a toxic cocktail of pride, poverty, and despair. He wants to prove his superiority, to test the boundaries of morality itself. The genius of Dostoevsky is that he doesn’t frame the murder as a whodunit, but as a whydunit. We know from the start that Raskolnikov swung the axe. What we don’t know is whether he can survive his own conscience. The book becomes a relentless psychological chase — not between man and police, but between man and his soul.
The “punishment” in the title is not the Siberian prison Raskolnikov eventually faces, but the unbearable torment of his mind. Every encounter — with his sister Dunya, his friend Razumikhin, the cunning detective Porfiry, and the saintly prostitute Sonya — becomes a mirror reflecting his fractured humanity. Through them, Dostoevsky stages the moral debate of modern existence: is morality absolute or conditional? Can intellect justify evil? Is guilt proof of grace? Raskolnikov’s unraveling becomes a study in spiritual physics — every action generating equal and opposite anguish.
Dostoevsky himself had been a prisoner in Siberia, and his understanding of redemption through suffering saturates the book. The novel’s religious undertones aren’t preachy; they’re existential. Sonya’s faith contrasts Raskolnikov’s reason, and in their strange partnership lies the novel’s heartbeat — that compassion, not cleverness, redeems the human condition. His final acceptance of guilt is not defeat but resurrection: the triumph of humility over hubris.
On a societal level, Crime and Punishment anticipates the 20th century’s great moral crises. It warns of what happens when reason breaks free from empathy — when ideology replaces conscience. Dostoevsky foresaw both Nietzsche’s Übermensch and the totalitarian logic that would follow. Raskolnikov is the prototype of the modern intellectual criminal, the man who kills for an idea. Yet his collapse also affirms something timeless: the soul doesn’t bend to theory. It bleeds.
In the end, Crime and Punishment is not just a Russian novel; it’s a mirror for every age that confuses brilliance with wisdom. Dostoevsky shows that the greatest prisons are self-made, and that salvation begins where intellect ends — in surrender. If hell is isolation, then grace is the moment we see another human being and finally admit, I am no better than you.