Dostoevsky's great crime novel started life as a short magazine story
Deep in debt and supporting his late brother's family, Fyodor Dostoevsky pitched a modest tale to a journal whose editor he had publicly quarrelled with. Within months the story had swollen into Crime and Punishment, a novel about a student who kills for a theory and then cannot live with himself.
Raskolnikov is a penniless former law student in Saint Petersburg who persuades himself that exceptional people may break moral rules to clear obstacles from their path. He decides that robbing and killing a grasping old pawnbroker would free him to do great things. After the crime, which also claims the life of her half-sister, his reasoning collapses into fever, paranoia and revulsion, and the rest of the book tracks the psychological and practical fallout.
The novel's origins were financial. With his brother Mikhail dead since early 1864 and creditors pressing, Dostoevsky turned to Mikhail Katkov, publisher of The Russian Messenger, the prestigious monthly that also carried Turgenev and Tolstoy. In a September 1865 letter he described a young man seduced by half-formed radical ideas, a theme he thought the conservative Katkov would welcome. By November the story had become a novel.
The notebooks show how hard the form was to find. Dostoevsky tried several first-person versions, including a memoir, a confession and a diary begun days after the killing. In November 1865 he switched to third-person narration that nonetheless stays close inside the hero's mind, an approach critics regard as innovative. The biographer Joseph Frank suggests the character simply outgrew the original design.
Deadlines added pressure: Dostoevsky was also bound by a harsh contract to deliver The Gambler to Fyodor Stellovsky, and he leaned on the stenographer Anna Snitkina, whom he later married. The serial ran in twelve instalments from January to December 1866. It was his second full-length novel after a decade of Siberian exile and is widely seen as the first great work of his maturity. Around Raskolnikov, figures such as the drunken clerk Marmeladov and his daughter Sonya, forced into prostitution to feed the family, give the book its moral weight.
Source: Crime and Punishment
