The Theory on Trial
Full spoilers ahead for Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, the ending included. I am using Constance Garnett’s English translation, Project Gutenberg ebook twenty-five fifty-four, so every name and every count in this video follows her spelling.
The idea belongs to Raskolnikov, a penniless former student who decides that a few extraordinary people may step over the law. The novel tests it across six parts and an epilogue. In my reading the theory loses, and it loses fast. From the first scene to the confession is about two weeks of story time, by my own count. Here is the case, day by day.
Two Weeks on a Clock
The clock comes from the novel’s own time markers. They wobble in places, and the novel admits why: at the start of part six it says Raskolnikov mixed up the dates of certain events. So treat my day numbers as careful estimates.
Day one is a hot July evening, when Raskolnikov visits a pawnbroker to rehearse. Day two brings a letter from his mother and a chance remark in the Hay Market. Day three, around half past seven in the evening, is the murder.
Then the fever. His friend Razumihin says he has barely eaten or drunk for four days, and he drifts in and out of delirium. By about day eight he is up, and in one night he meets Sonia and finds his mother and sister waiting in his room. Days nine and ten hold two police conversations, a visit from Svidrigailov and the confession to Sonia.
The last stretch comes two or three days after Katerina Ivanovna’s funeral. That is the final Porfiry meeting, Svidrigailov’s end and the walk to the police station. Then the epilogue jumps ahead to nine months into the sentence, almost a year and a half after the crime.
Parts One and Two: The Rehearsal and the Fever
Part one is about thirty-six thousand words, and the crime is its last chapter. He counts everything, even the steps from his door to the pawnbroker’s: exactly seven hundred and thirty. In a tavern he meets a drunken official, Marmeladov, who tells him about his daughter Sonia, driven onto the streets to feed her stepmother’s children. His mother writes that his sister Dounia is engaged to a man named Luzhin, partly for his sake.
In another tavern he overhears a student argue that one old woman’s death could pay for a hundred good deeds. The student calls it simple arithmetic. Raskolnikov had already been thinking the same thing. He kills the pawnbroker Alyona Ivanovna, and her sister Lizaveta, who walks in at the wrong moment. I will keep it at that.
Part two, about thirty-nine thousand words, is the fever. He faints in the police office when the talk turns to the murder, and the officials begin to look at him twice. Later he nearly confesses to a clerk named Zametov, in a way that sounds like a joke. Then Marmeladov is run over, and Raskolnikov spends his last money on the family. That is where he first sees Sonia.
Part Three: The First Porfiry
Part three opens with his mother and sister, and he orders Dounia to drop Luzhin. Then he goes with Razumihin to the investigator Porfiry Petrovitch, who says he has been expecting him. Porfiry has read Raskolnikov’s magazine article on crime, and he wants to talk about it.
He also asks, almost lightly, whether Raskolnikov saw the painters at work in the dead woman’s flat. The answer comes a little too readily, and afterwards Razumihin argues that it was no trap at all.
That is the theory, in the man’s own words. People divide into ordinary and extraordinary. The extraordinary have, he says, an inner right to step over a corpse for the sake of an idea. He names Kepler, Newton and Napoleon. Porfiry asks if he believes in God and in Lazarus. Raskolnikov says he does.
Porfiry smiles and asks whether we don’t all think ourselves Napoleons now. Walking home, a stranger calls Raskolnikov a murderer, to his face. Back in his room, he has a visitor he has only heard about in letters. Svidrigailov has arrived.
Part Four: The Butterfly
Svidrigailov is the man who once pursued Dounia. He now offers her ten thousand roubles, and he tells Raskolnikov they have something in common. He also says, with a twisted smile, that his dead wife Marfa Petrovna is pleased to visit him as a ghost.
At eleven that night Raskolnikov goes to Sonia’s room and asks her to read the raising of Lazarus aloud. He tells her he has only her now. In the next room, Svidrigailov stands at a door and listens.
The second Porfiry conversation comes the next morning, at eleven. Porfiry says a man circling a flame will keep circling, and he describes a butterfly round a candle. Raskolnikov is close to breaking when a house painter named Nikolay bursts in and says he did the murders.
The painter’s confession is false, and Porfiry knows it. In my reading, this is the novel’s cruelest joke on the theory. Raskolnikov walks free by luck, and he is no happier. Free of the police, he still has nowhere to put what he feels.
Part Five: Sonia Takes Over
Part five is about twenty-eight and a half thousand words. At Katerina Ivanovna’s funeral dinner, Luzhin accuses Sonia of stealing a hundred-rouble note. A neighbour, Lebeziatnikov, says he saw Luzhin slip it into her pocket. Luzhin leaves, shamed, and the dinner falls apart.
That evening Raskolnikov confesses to Sonia. He says it was not hunger. He says he wanted to find out whether he was a Napoleon, and he tells her he murdered himself, not the old woman. She tells him to go to the crossroads, kiss the earth and say the word, and she offers him a cross of cypress wood. He refuses for now, but admits the police are on his track.
Katerina Ivanovna goes mad and dies that night, and Svidrigailov offers to pay for the orphans. Count the name Sonia, and Part five stands out. It uses her name one hundred and ninety-nine times, more than any other part.
Part Six: You Are the Murderer
Part six, about thirty-six thousand words, begins in a fog of days. Razumihin decides Raskolnikov must be a political conspirator, which is wrong but kind. Then comes the third Porfiry conversation.
This time Porfiry says it flat: you are the murderer. He admits he has no hard proof. He asks Raskolnikov to give himself up, and says a lighter sentence would follow. Earlier, Svidrigailov told Raskolnikov that what all men need is fresh air. Porfiry now says it three times in a row.
Svidrigailov takes Dounia to his rooms and tells her what he overheard through the door. She fires a revolver at him, and he lets her go. He gives Sonia three thousand roubles for the orphans, and before dawn he shoots himself.
Raskolnikov kisses the ground in the Hay Market. At the police station he hears Svidrigailov is dead. He steps out, meets Sonia, steps back in, and says, quietly, that it was he who killed the old pawnbroker and her sister.
The Epilogue: Eight Years
The epilogue is only about sixty-four hundred words. Raskolnikov is tried for what he confesses, and it counts for him that he once rescued two children from a fire. He is sentenced to eight years. His mother dies, Dounia marries Razumihin, and Sonia follows him to Siberia, where she writes letters every month about how he is doing. The other convicts dislike and avoid him, and they call her their dear little mother.
In prison he does not repent of the crime, the narrator says, and he thinks his theory was no stupider than any other. He falls ill, dreams of a plague that makes people sure of their own truth, and then falls at Sonia’s feet. In my reading, that is the verdict on the theory.
The text puts it in one line: life had stepped into the place of theory. Seven years remain, and the narrator calls the rest another story.
Who Held a Piece
Five people hold a piece of the truth. Marmeladov asks what it means to have nowhere to turn. Sonia hears the whole confession and tells him to confess in the open. Razumihin guesses wrong, and loves him anyway. Svidrigailov overhears everything, and uses it.
Dounia hears the truth from Svidrigailov, in his rooms, before her brother tells her himself. Porfiry holds the most: he knows, and he says so, but all he has is psychology and a small fact he never names.
The point is that nobody in the book catches Raskolnikov with evidence. Nikolay’s false confession even clears him for a while. He is caught by people, one conversation at a time, and by his own need to be understood. In my reading, that is the real trial.
The Counts
Now the counts, with the method. I removed the licence, the contents and the translator’s preface, then counted words part by part, about two hundred and five thousand in all. I counted every word that begins with fever or deliri, and every use of the name Sonia. This translation never once spells it Sonya.
Fever and delirium words total one hundred and twelve. Part one has eight, part two twenty-seven, part three twenty-nine, part four eighteen, part five seven, part six eleven and the epilogue twelve. Part three peaks partly because other people keep explaining him away. Per word, the epilogue is the most feverish, at about nineteen in every ten thousand words.
Sonia appears four hundred and two times in all. That is twenty-four in part one, eleven in part two, thirty-two in part three, sixty-three in part four, one hundred and ninety-nine in part five, forty-seven in part six and twenty-six in the epilogue. Part five holds almost half of them.
If you read it yourself, the Garnett text is free from Project Gutenberg. In my reading, start with part one and do not skip part five. Subscribe, tap like, and tell me in the comments which part you think breaks his theory. The full part by part guide is at book explained dot com, and the link is in the description.
