[3][4][5][6] Crime and Punishment follows the mental anguish and moral dilemmas of Rodion Raskolnikov, an impoverished ex-student in Saint Petersburg who plans to kill an unscrupulous pawnbroker, an old woman who stores money and valuable objects in her flat.

He theorises that with the money he could liberate himself from poverty and go on to perform great deeds, and seeks to convince himself that certain crimes are justifiable if they are committed in order to remove obstacles to the higher goals of "extraordinary" men.

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.

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.

Fearing a search, he hides the stolen items under a large rock in an empty yard, noticing in humiliation that he has not even checked how much money is in the purse.

Still feverish, Raskolnikov listens nervously to a conversation between Razumikhin and the doctor about the status of the police investigation into the murders: a muzhik called Mikolka, who was working in a neighbouring flat at the time, has been detained, and the old woman's clients are being interviewed.

Now free and with significant capital, they excitedly begin to discuss plans for the future, but Raskolnikov suddenly gets up and leaves, telling them, to their great consternation, that it might be the last time he sees them.

With Raskolnikov's anger reaching fever pitch, Porfiry hints that he has a "little surprise" for him behind the partition in his office, but at that moment there is a commotion outside the door and a young man (Mikolka the painter) bursts in, followed by some policemen.

To Raskolnikov's surprise, Svidrigailov suddenly appears and informs him that he will be using the ten thousand rubles intended for Dunya to make the funeral arrangements and to place the children in good orphanages.

[24] From another point of view, the novel's plot is another variation of a conventional nineteenth-century theme: an innocent young provincial comes to seek his fortune in the capital, where he succumbs to corruption, and loses all traces of his former freshness and purity.

However, as Gary Rosenshield points out, "Raskolnikov succumbs not to the temptations of high society as Honoré de Balzac's Rastignac or Stendhal's Julien Sorel, but to those of rationalistic Petersburg".

Believing society would be better for it, Raskolnikov commits murder with the idea that he possesses enough intellectual and emotional fortitude to deal with the ramifications, but his sense of guilt soon overwhelms him to the point of psychological and somatic illness.

Sonya (Sofya Semyonovna Marmeladova) is the daughter of a drunkard named Semyon Zakharovich Marmeladov, whom Raskolnikov meets in a tavern at the beginning of the novel.

She initially plans to marry the wealthy but unsavory lawyer Luzhin, thinking it will enable her to ease her family's desperate financial situation and escape her former employer Svidrigailov.

He tells Sonya that he has made financial arrangements for the Marmeladov children to enter an orphanage, and gives her three thousand rubles, enabling her to follow Raskolnikov to Siberia.

Porfiry Petrovich – The head of the Investigation Department in charge of solving the murders of Lizaveta and Alyona Ivanovna, who, along with Sonya, moves Raskolnikov towards confession.

Dostoevsky's letter to Katkov reveals his immediate inspiration, to which he remained faithful even after his original plan evolved into a much more ambitious creation: a desire to counteract what he regarded as nefarious consequences arising from the doctrines of Russian nihilism.

[27] In the novel, Dostoevsky pinpointed the dangers of both utilitarianism and rationalism, the main ideas of which inspired the radicals, continuing a fierce criticism he had already started with his Notes from Underground.

He thus attacked a peculiar Russian blend of French utopian socialism and Benthamite utilitarianism, which had developed under revolutionary thinkers such as Nikolai Chernyshevsky and became known as rational egoism.

Contemporary scholar Joseph Frank writes that "the moral-psychological traits of his character incorporate this antinomy between instinctive kindness, sympathy, and pity on the one hand and, on the other, a proud and idealistic egoism that has become perverted into a contemptuous disdain for the submissive herd".

[31] Raskolnikov's inner conflict in the opening section of the novel results in a utilitarian-altruistic justification for the proposed crime: why not kill a wretched and "useless" old moneylender to alleviate the human misery?

[32] Such radical and utilitarian ideas act to reinforce the innate egoism of Raskolnikov's character, and help justify his contempt for humanity's lower qualities and ideals.

I. F. I. Evnin regards Crime and Punishment as the first great Russian novel "in which the climactic moments of the action are played out in dirty taverns, on the street, in the sordid back rooms of the poor".

[35] The crowded streets and squares, the shabby houses and taverns, the noise and stench, all are transformed by Dostoevsky into a rich store of metaphors for states of mind.

Steven Cassedy argues that Crime and Punishment "is formally two distinct but closely related, things, namely a particular type of tragedy in the classical Greek mold and a Christian resurrection tale".

Strakhov rejected Pisarev's contention that the theme of environmental determinism was essential to the novel, and pointed out that Dostoevsky's attitude towards his hero was sympathetic: "This is not mockery of the younger generation, neither a reproach nor an accusation—it is a lament over it.

[52] Raskolnikov is a "son of Earth" whose egoistic aspirations lead him to ideas and actions that alienate him from the very source of his strength, and he must bow down to her before she can relieve him of the terrible burden of his guilt.

[53][54] Philosopher and Orthodox theologian Nikolay Berdyaev shared Solovyov and the symbolists' sense of the novel's spiritual significance, seeing it as an illustration of the modern age's hubristic self-deification, or what he calls "the suicide of man by self-affirmation".

[58] The affinity of Crime and Punishment with both religious mysticism and psychoanalysis led to suppression of discussion in Soviet Russia: interpretations of Raskolnikov tended to align with Pisarev's idea of reaction to unjust socio-economic conditions.

Dostoevsky's art, Bakhtin argues, is inherently dialogical: events proceed on the basis of interaction between self-validating subjective voices, often within the consciousness of an individual character, as is the case with Raskolnikov.