60 Fun Facts About Crime and Punishment

In which literary journal was Crime and Punishment first published, in twelve monthly instalments?

The same journal was the outlet for Turgenev and Tolstoy; Dostoevsky had never published in it before, having feuded with its editor in the early 1860s.

In which year did the serialised novel run from January to December?

The first part appeared in the January issue and the last in December, and Dostoevsky was writing under intense deadline pressure the whole way.

Before dropping out, what subject had Raskolnikov been studying?

His loyal friend from university had studied the same subject, and their shared background gives the pair's arguments about crime a professional edge.

What weapon does Raskolnikov steal to carry out the murder?

He takes it from the caretaker's room in his own building, one of many small strokes of luck that let him get in and out unseen.

What is the trade of the old woman Raskolnikov plans to rob and kill?

He first visits her flat on the pretext of leaving a watch as security, a dry run that lets him study the layout.

Who is the unplanned second victim of the murders?

She simply walks in on the scene, and her death shatters the neat logic of killing one 'useless' person for the greater good.

Where does Raskolnikov hide the items he stole?

He realises with humiliation that he has never even counted the money in the purse he took.

Why is Raskolnikov summoned to the police station the morning after the murders?

The summons is pure coincidence, but when the officers start discussing the murders he collapses in a faint and draws their attention.

Which loyal university friend nurses Raskolnikov through his delirium and later marries his sister Dunya?

His name plays on razum, the Russian word for sense or reason, and he jokes that it is really Vrazumikhin, 'one who brings people to their senses'.

How does Sonya's father, the drunkard Marmeladov, die?

Raskolnikov carries the dying man home and gives the family his last money for the funeral.

Which Gospel story does Sonya read aloud to Raskolnikov?

The passage from John foreshadows Raskolnikov's own resurrection from the spiritual death of his crime.

Which investigator pursues Raskolnikov through psychological cat-and-mouse rather than evidence?

He never makes a direct accusation, preferring insinuation and irony to provoke a confession, and later drops the games to urge Raskolnikov to confess for his own good.

What was the title of the article Raskolnikov published months earlier, which the investigator brings up?

The article argues that rare individuals have the right to 'step across' moral and legal boundaries if those boundaries obstruct a great idea.

Which historical figure does Raskolnikov invoke as the model of a man entitled to transgress moral law?

The murder is partly a test of whether he belongs to that 'extraordinary' class, and his collapse afterwards answers the question.

What drives Mikolka the painter to falsely confess to the murders?

His confession bursts into the investigator's office at the exact moment a hidden witness was about to be produced, and it forces Raskolnikov's release.

What does Dunya's fiancé Luzhin plant on Sonya to frame her as a thief?

He stages the accusation at the Marmeladovs' funeral banquet, hoping to disgrace Sonya and drive a wedge between Raskolnikov and his family.

Who exposes Luzhin's attempt to frame Sonya, having seen him slip the money into her pocket?

The witness had assumed at the time that he was watching an act of anonymous charity.

Who overhears Raskolnikov's confession to Sonya from the room next door?

He later taunts Raskolnikov by quoting his own words back at him, and uses the secret to try to pressure Dunya.

When Dunya fires a pistol at her former employer and narrowly misses, what does he do?

Crushed by her hatred, he then tells her to leave; it is the last time they see each other.

How does Dunya's former employer die?

He spends his last night in a miserable hotel and acts the following morning, having first arranged money for the Marmeladov orphans.

How many rubles does Dunya's former employer give Sonya so she can follow Raskolnikov?

It is the same sum his late wife had left Dunya in her will.

What sentence does Raskolnikov receive for the two murders?

The court is lenient because he confessed fully at a time when another man had already claimed the crime, and because of his mental state at the time.

What happens to Raskolnikov's mother, Pulkheria Alexandrovna, after his sentencing?

The truth about her son was hidden from her, but in her final illness she hints that she understood more than anyone had told her.

The Russian word Prestupleniye in the original title literally translates as what?

The image of crime as crossing a boundary, with its religious sense of transgression, is lost in the English word.

The surname Raskolnikov derives from the Russian raskolnik, meaning what?

The word traditionally referred to the Old Believers who split from the Russian Orthodox Church, and it marks the hero as a man divided against himself.

The first name Rodion comes from Greek and indicates an inhabitant of which island?

His mother calls him by the affectionate diminutive Rodya.

Into how many parts, plus an epilogue, is the novel divided?

Critic Edward Wasiolek saw the structure as a 'flattened X': the proud, rational hero of the first half gives way to the humbled, irrational one of the second, with the turn at the exact midpoint.

From which narrative perspective is the finished novel told?

Dostoevsky first drafted it as a first-person memoir and diary, and only recast it in the third person in November 1865, rewriting from scratch.

Which other novel was Dostoevsky contracted to finish for Stellovsky while writing Crime and Punishment?

He dictated it to a stenographer in 26 days to meet the deadline, and married her the following year.

Which stenographer helped Dostoevsky through the crush of deadlines and later became his wife?

She was twenty years old and a pupil of the Petersburg stenographer Pavel Olkhin when she took the job.

Which publisher did Dostoevsky approach, as a last resort, for an advance on the novel?

In his pitch letter of September 1865 he described a young man who yields to 'certain strange, unfinished ideas, yet floating in the air'.

Which Tolstoy novel was being serialised in the same journal at the same time as Crime and Punishment?

The conservative critic Nikolay Strakhov recalled Dostoevsky's novel, not Tolstoy's, as the literary sensation of the year.

Dostoevsky wrote the novel partly to counter which ideology popular with 1860s young radicals?

He attacked a peculiarly Russian blend of French utopian socialism and Benthamite utilitarianism that Chernyshevsky's followers called rational egoism.

Who produced the first English translation of Crime and Punishment, in 1885?

More than a dozen English versions have followed, including Pevear and Volokhonsky's in 1992 and Oliver Ready's in 2014.

Which actor played Raskolnikov in the 1935 Hollywood film version?

He returned to the role in 1947 for an episode of the NBC radio series Mystery in the Air.

Who played Raskolnikov in the BBC's three-part 1979 serial?

He returned to the story in a 2002 Russian film, this time playing the investigator opposite Crispin Glover.

Aki Kaurismäki's 1983 debut film transplanted the story to which modern city?

Titled Rikos ja Rangaistus, it was the first feature by the director later known for Le Havre and The Man Without a Past.

Which manga pioneer adapted the novel as a comic in 1953?

A later manga, Crime and Punishment: A Falsified Romance, became a live-action series in 2012.

Michel, the protagonist of which 1959 Robert Bresson film, is based on Raskolnikov?

Paul Schrader has said Bresson's Michel in turn inspired Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver, giving Raskolnikov an unlikely grandson.

Which 2005 Woody Allen thriller is partly a debate with Crime and Punishment?

Chris Wilton identifies with Raskolnikov, then kills two people and narrowly escapes justice.

Whose Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics argued that the novel's art is 'dialogical', a battle of competing voices?

His reading was a rare exception in the Soviet era, when the novel's religious and psychoanalytic dimensions were mostly suppressed.

How old is Raskolnikov when the novel takes place?

The book describes him as exceptionally handsome, tall and slim, with beautiful dark eyes and dark brown hair.

How many rubles, his last, does Raskolnikov give to Marmeladov's widow?

The money had just arrived from his mother; Luzhin later cites the gift as proof of his dissolute character.

To which hot-tempered police official, nicknamed 'Gunpowder', does Raskolnikov confess?

He was the first officer to suspect Raskolnikov, back on the day of the fainting fit at the bureau.

What is the profession of Luzhin, the wealthy suitor Dunya agrees to marry?

He more or less admits he wanted a wife poor enough to be completely beholden to him, which is exactly why Raskolnikov loathes the match.

Why had Raskolnikov's landlady, Praskovya Pavlovna, extended him such generous credit?

She later handed his promissory note to a court councillor named Chebarov, which is what triggers the police summons.

Which doctor, interested in 'psychological' illnesses, tends Raskolnikov during his delirium?

His bedside talk about the police investigation, overheard by the feverish patient, is what first tells Raskolnikov that a house painter has been detained.

What is the name of the old woman Raskolnikov murders?

She hoards money in her flat and is merciless to her clients; Raskolnikov leaves most of her wealth untouched.

From what disease is Sonya's stepmother, Katerina Ivanovna, dying?

Half-mad and obsessed with proving slum life is beneath her station, she dies raving in Sonya's room after being turned out onto the street.

How much does Dunya's former employer offer her, in rubles, to stop her marrying Luzhin?

Raskolnikov refuses the money on her behalf; the offer is later redirected to placing the Marmeladov children in orphanages.

How many rubles did Dostoevsky earn from Crime and Punishment, still not enough to cover his debts?

His new wife had to sell her valuables to fund their delayed honeymoon, which then lasted more than four years abroad.

Which existentialist thinkers acknowledged the novel's influence, according to its reception history?

Freud admired the book too, and the Bloomsbury Group's Virginia Woolf and D. H. Lawrence both wrote about it.

Where do the novel's climactic scenes mostly play out, a setting Evnin called new for Russian fiction?

Dostoevsky was among the first novelists to treat the modern city itself as a store of metaphors for states of mind.

Scholars name Dostoevsky's early drafts of the novel after Wiesbaden and which other city?

The final plan abandoned a first-person narrator, though he had considered four first-person forms including a memoir and a diary.

In one abandoned first-person plan, Raskolnikov's confession was recorded how long after the murder?

Another plan had him begin a diary five days after the killing; a third mixed memoir and diary.

In which year did Constance Garnett publish her English translation of the novel?

David Magarshack (1951) and Jessie Coulson (1953) followed; Coulson's version became the Norton Critical Edition.

Which French screen legend starred in Georges Lampin's 1956 film of the novel?

Robert Hossein co-starred; a two-part Soviet version by Lev Kulidzhanov followed in 1970.

Who played Raskolnikov in Lev Kulidzhanov's two-part 1970 Soviet film?

Vladimir Basov, Tatyana Bedova and Victoria Fyodorova were also in the cast.

Which of these Bloomsbury-linked writers is cited as having discussed Crime and Punishment?

John Middleton Murry and D. H. Lawrence also wrote about it, and Freud held Dostoevsky's work in high esteem.

Where does Raskolnikov first meet the drunkard Marmeladov?

Marmeladov tells him about his daughter Sonya, who has turned to prostitution to feed the family.