Dostoevsky - Crime and Punishment - A Philosophical Guide

Hello everyone! I’m Stephen West. This is Philosophize This!

Out of a deep respect for all the readers who are fans of great literature I feel the need to repeat that this post is not intended to be a substitute for reading the actual book.

My dad used to tell me I have one skill: getting in the way. That led to an inferiority complex that caused me to spend years of my life reading philosophy. Well now I have two skills, Dad. Who’s laughing now?

The main character we’re talking about today is a fan favorite. For some this is one of the most memorable, relatable characters in maybe all of classic literature— it’s a young man by the name of Rodion Raskolnikov, or just Raskolnikov for short.

On the surface, Crime and Punishment kind of masquerades as being about this guy Raskolnikov.

He takes an axe, murders two innocent people, and then deals with the personal and legal fallout of doing something like that.

That’s what the book masquerades as.

But part of what makes this book such a work of brilliance from Dostoevsky is that the murder is actually a secondary thing to the main point of the book for him.

There’s a sense in which the book could have been about a lot of different things. But a double murder, for Dostoevsky, is going to be an absolutely perfect site to explore the contradictions of Russian nihilism, when taken to their natural ends as consequences in the real world.

It’s been said that the true drama of Crime and Punishment is actually the complexity of the internal experience of Raskolnikov.

That it’s about him coming to terms, slowly and painfully, with the true reasons why he committed the murders in the first place— and that he’s been lying to himself for a very long time.

We’ll get into all of it, but I want to make sure at the beginning of this we avoid one pretty popular mistake to make about this book and Raskolnikov as a character.

People will often say that Raskolnikov is an embodiment of the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche.

They’ll say he builds his worldview around the idea that God is dead. They’ll say he sees himself as an Übermensch, and that Friedrich Nietzsche is someone whose work can be thought of as essentially just a character— that’s one component of a Dostoevsky novel.

But to say this is to misunderstand both Nietzsche and what Dostoevsky was going for in the character of Raskolnikov.

First of all, just to cover the space-time end of this mistake first: Crime and Punishment is written in 1866. The first time Nietzsche mentions "God is dead" is in his book The Gay Science, which was written in 1882.

In other words, Dostoevsky writes this book sixteen years before Nietzsche ever explicitly even wrote those words.

Secondly, there’s no evidence that Dostoevsky ever even knew who Nietzsche was. Nietzsche knew who Dostoevsky was toward the later period of his life, and it should be said he was a fan of what he was doing. But the interpretation of this character as being a literal reference to Nietzsche is not something that really adds up.

So maybe you say, “Well, it’s not that Dostoevsky was referencing Nietzsche directly, but the character of Raskolnikov was referencing ideas that were going on at the time that Nietzsche later crystallized in his philosophy!”

Well, this is an even worse misunderstanding.

Because Raskolnikov was exactly the kind of person that Nietzsche spent most of his career critiquing.

Let’s take a closer look at who he was as a character.

If you read last post on Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground, the book that immediately precedes Crime and Punishment, then you’ll remember me saying that it’s helpful to think of the Underground Man as sort of the prototype version of the character of Raskolnikov. They have several key similarities that were important to Dostoevsky.

Raskolnikov, like the Underground Man, is very smart. He is in poverty. He often thinks about things in isolation. And he also thinks he sees through many of the systems of ideas that other people seriously believe in.

And similar to the Underground Man, all of these things lead him to feel a similar sense of superiority that he has over his fellow people around him.

He has all of these same qualities— but unlike the Underground Man, Raskolnikov is someone who’s not completely trapped in his house. He’s someone who’s still capable of taking action on things, which means he’s still someone who’s capable of making mistakes.

So here’s his big idea that he gets at the beginning of the book: his situation sucks. He’s poor and has had to temporarily drop out of law school.

More than that, he gets a letter from his mom telling him back at home his sister has decided to get married to a rich guy that’s a horrible person just so she can support him in going to law school.

I mean, what kind of world do we live in, where good people like this are in such dire situations?

Oh, but then there’s this pawnbroker that he knows.

Being someone who’s behind on his rent pretty often, he knows this woman who’ll trade money for stuff, Alyona Ivanova.

And everybody knows this woman as a real mean, greedy, exploitative kind of person. Not only does she give people basically no money for their things when they come to her, but then she charges them massive interest simply because they’re desperate and she can get away with it.

More than that, she just hoards all the money she does get. She doesn’t recirculate it.

She’s the kind of person that will even exploit people who are mentally handicapped. She does this with her half-sister who lives with her, who is clearly not happy living with how she’s treated, but she has to endure it anyway. She is trapped in an abusive situation.

So Raskolnikov has a plan: why not just kill this pawnbroker?

After all, everybody wins here. Her half-sister gets set free. Raskolnikov’s sister won’t have to marry the rich dude.

At the end of the day, the world will have one less greedy, miserable person that is really just, rationally speaking, a net negative on the system if we’re being honest.

People sometimes ask if you could go back in time and kill baby Hitler, wouldn’t you want to do it? Here’s Raskolnikov being downright proactive.

It’s clear to Raskolnikov that everybody who’s around this person is made worse just by being around her. And if her money wasn’t being hoarded, then he could give it to somebody that needs it more— not the least of which would be himself.

After all, he knows he’s going to use it to go to school to become a lawyer. And think of all the good that would come if he were able to do that. This is his thinking.

So he does it.

He overhears the half-sister the day before saying that she’s going to be out of the house for a couple hours.

He grabs an axe. Classic weapon of choice. And then he goes over and kills the pawnbroker.

Sadly, in the process of doing it, the half-sister who was supposed to be gone ends up walking into the room. Now she’s got to go too.

After killing both of them he takes her money, runs away, leaves a certain amount of incriminating evidence— and then locks himself in his house and begins the long nightmare of trying to process the consequences of what it is that he’s just done.

For some context here, as we talked about last post, Dostoevsky always has in his sights the rational utopianism of his time, where part of it is believing that through utilitarian, rational calculations, we can arrive at the truth, and we can arrive at a utopian socialist system of organizing people that can be perfected if we just get better at this moral calculus.

That by just weighing the rational pros and cons of an action, we can justify our actions as long as we can prove that the pros outweighed the cons.

This is exactly the kind of calculation that Raskolnikov has made with the pawnbroker’s life. He decided he was qualified to calculate whether or not the world was a better place without her.

There are two big problems with this philosophically for Dostoevsky, both of which blossom out of the Russian nihilism that was gaining popularity when he was writing this book.

One of them is that utilitarianism we just talked about.

Consider how quickly his perfectly calculated plan transformed into something with an innocent person getting an axe to the head.

Funny how difficult it is to do an accurate weighing of the pros and cons of something when you realize you’re trying to make that calculation about a world that you can’t fully predict.

The second big problem is the rational egoism that often accompanies this Russian nihilism, that magically places Raskolnikov at the center of this decision-making process.

The assumption that’s made has two parts:

1. I am someone who can look out at the world and rationally calculate what the objective right thing to do is.

2. The individual is the arbiter of that choice.

To Dostoevsky, the utilitarianism would be bad enough, but it’s the egocentric part of this that makes it particularly bad.

Because an important detail to this is that Raskolnikov believes that he is special in the book.

Actually, to be more accurate, he thinks he might be special. He knows that special people exist sometimes— people like Napoleon, people like Muhammad. He knows there are people every so often throughout history that will come along and go against the traditional moral order of things and create what he calls a “new word.”

What he means by that is they create a new set of moral criteria for themselves to live by.

This is why Raskolnikov wanted to commit the murders. He wanted to find out if he’s capable of being one of these special people.

He thinks that because he sees through these outdated systems where a god tells everyone what to do, he thinks his job now is to create his own morality and essentially become a god himself.

He says repeatedly in the book he wants to run a test to see if this is the kind of person he is.

And this is no doubt where people mistake this as being something that’s connected to Nietzsche and his theoretical concept of the Übermensch.

There’s a common misunderstanding of Nietzsche that’s possible here, where people think he declares that God is dead— and so now what we have to do is recreate morality in our own image.

But Nietzsche’s critique is actually something far more radical than this.

To Nietzsche, if the Übermensch is someone that exists out there, then they’re probably someone who’s transcended the very idea of codified morality altogether. They’re not someone that tries to recreate it or to participate in it as an activity.

To affirm reality at the level that Nietzsche’s talking about in his work is to accept the fact that, first of all, obviously to him, there are not moral categories that are written into the universe like good and evil.

So the real question is: when people sit around and moralize about which things are good or evil in the world, and sit around and use their time to judge people’s behavior, how can we explain the activity they’re involved in there? What is morality really?

For Nietzsche, one way to look at it is that morality is often a complex expression of the wills of a bunch of passive, reactive people.

Meaning, what morality is at bottom is a reactive way of describing the world and what happens in it.

The people that engage in moralizing about things are always fundamentally doing something passive. They are looking out at the world, waiting for things to happen, deciding whether this or that behavior corresponds to some pre-existing set of moral protocols that someone else came up with, and then they categorize that behavior in some way—usually based on the duality of good vs. evil.

But regardless of whatever kind of moral scorekeeping most people do, these things aren’t actually good or evil to Nietzsche. Moral categories like that are just the kind of things we say when a lot of people out there collectively agree. It’s a formation of their wills, collectively.

But someone affirming reality at the level Nietzsche’s talking about with the Übermensch just wouldn’t look at the world in terms of moral protocols.

The only criteria that would matter to them about whether something was worth doing or not is whether it really is something that corresponds to their own will.

A difficult enough task in its own right.

So morality generally isn’t a behavior that the Übermensch would have much time for.

It’s too passive for someone that’s affirming life in this way. It’s too much sitting around judging the things that are happening to you, rather than being the person that’s making things happen.

Nietzsche’s Übermensch, then, is not someone that recreates morality in their own image, like Raskolnikov. The Übermensch, if this is someone who can exist, would have, in a sense, transcended the very concept of morality itself in terms of how they act in the world.

So when Raskolnikov in the book rejects the moral rules of a god he thinks is fake. When he then thinks it’s a good idea to come up with a bunch of rational arguments for moral rules that are supposed to more accurately describe what’s good or bad.

Well, that’s not Nietzsche’s philosophy.

Nietzsche would say he’s just recreating the very reactive processes that he’s a product of.

And, by being a rational utilitarian, he’s not surprisingly pulling from the very ideas that were fed into him by the counterculture of the world he lives in.

Raskolnikov is not an example of Nietzsche’s Übermensch. He’s an example of a very particular kind of nihilism that’s gaining popularity in Russia during this time.

And by the way, this shouldn’t be a disappointment to anyone, because that’s exactly what Dostoevsky was going for anyway.

A very interesting part about all this is that this critique from Nietzsche actually shares a kind of resemblance to the critique that Dostoevsky is going to have of Raskolnikov.

Because Dostoevsky would be very skeptical of anybody out there—Raskolnikov included— that thinks they’re a special individual that’s above everybody else around them.

After Raskolnikov commits the murders, there’s a detective in the book named Porfiry that asks Raskolnikov a difficult series of questions as he’s investigating him.

He asks, “When it comes to these special people that you believe in, how is anyone supposed to know the difference between one of these actual special people and someone who just thinks they’re special? Are you the person that gets to decide whether you are someone who’s special or not? What if you’re wrong? What if you’re not very special—and that’s exactly what makes you think you’re more special than you are?”

(not an actual quote. just speaking as him)

The rational egoism at the heart of his worldview starts to run into its built in contradictions— and it goes much further than this for Dostoevsky.

Because maybe you say back to the detective there, "Well look, I’m special because I’m different. If you look at my worldview, I am truly an original kind of person. I don’t follow the typical norms and customs people do!"

But Dostoevsky might ask this person what they mean when they say they are “different.”

Different from what? Oh, do you mean different from the culture that you’re supposedly not a part of, but yet it still defines what your position is here anyway?

What Dostoevsky would say is that Raskolnikov is not actually recreating a new morality from the ground up as the sort of man-god that he thinks he is.

He’s, in reality, still very much shaped by the relational network of ideas, people, and things that he’s a part of— and that that’s true of his thinking, no matter how many rational theories he can come up with for why a different morality is really the one that applies to him.

To Dostoevsky, we are creatures that are co-constituted by the world we’re in.

Where else could Raskolnikov have gotten these ideas from? What else could he be, other than this relational network that he’s a part of?

It’s easy to sit in isolation and create a list of utilitarian rules about what your values are.

But the fact that it can feel to you like you are the one that solely, individually came up with those ideas, the fact it can feel like these are your special ideas that you’ve reasoned to can be an illusion that smacks you in the face the second these theories are tested in the real world.

And the first evidence you can see of Raskolnikov coming to terms with this for himself is when he commits these two murders and then his life turns into an absolute living hell.

Yeah, turns out: it didn’t matter how many utilitarian arguments he had about why killing these people was the right thing to do. On the other side of actually doing it, he clearly does not feel like this was morally justifiable.

He’s not the person he thought he was. He is sick every day with guilt, he can’t sleep, and when he does sleep he has nightmares. He’s fainting in public. He’s living his entire life on the run. Not only from all the people who suspect him of doing this thing, but then further on the run from the family and friends that clearly know that something is very off with him.

If it’s not obvious, this is not the picture of a person who’s a man-god, who’s created their own set of moral values.

No, this is a picture of someone who has come up with a rationalization for their behavior, but truly, at their core, is a member of a network, a culture, and a set of ethical truths— where they now realize they just made a decision that completely violated what they actually believe.

It’s easy to get caught up on the murder because it’s so juicy. But Dostoevsky intended this as a critique of modernity that was much more broad. The murder is just a very pronounced version of a kind of experience we all have in a less pronounced way when we rationalize our behavior.

It is uniquely possible in the modern world to exist in a way where your whole life becomes about endlessly rationalizing your mistakes and coming up with a story that sounds good about them.

Raskolnikov told himself that he committed this crime to make the world a better place. And he had all the rational arguments to prove to you that he did.

But what he comes to find out over the course of the book is that he didn’t actually kill those people for utilitarian reasons. He did it as a type of ego-driven fantasy, where he wanted to run a test to see if he was special.

And he found out—with some of the highest stakes imaginable—that he’s not, in fact, as different as he once thought. That he’s still very much a part of the moral order he was supposedly rebelling against.

His attempt to recreate what god-centered approaches have done for people throughout the course of history was nothing more than a rationalization for his own ego.

And if, for the sake of conversation, we can accept Dostoevsky’s point here, then a very interesting question stems out of this about what it means to be an authentic person who’s living in a culture.

Does following the norms, customs, or religion of a culture have to be something that is life-denying?

If being an individual means you have to be different from everyone else, then a common criticism of religion by some people is that it flattens the world into a place where people can’t become individuals.

That it’s a renunciative tradition. People are forced to see feelings inside of them as evil. They have to hate things about themselves.

Is following a religion something that makes it impossible to be truly different?

But Dostoevsky might ask, couldn’t it also be the case that to truly be an individual is not to be different? And that it’s always—whether we realize it or not— to be an instantiation of a culture, and then to find a way to make that culture your own?

What he’s saying through Raskolnikov’s character is that there’s a way to affirm life by first being truly aware of your actual position in this relational network of being— and then after that, to fully consent to your participation in that set of roles.

That is the true mistake that Raskolnikov makes in the book. It’s not a moral mistake. It’s not a legal mistake. To Dostoevsky, it was a religious type of mistake. It’s an alienation from his role in this network of being he’s a part of.

Given the work he did in Notes From Underground just before this it seems like a large part of what he intended to convey here is that Raskolnikov, at bottom, has a really deep lack of self-awareness. Probably from not engaging with nihilism at a serious enough level.

And there’s a clear example of this in the book.

There’s another character that Raskolnikov eventually falls in love with and realizes he wants to be more like— it’s a woman named Sonya. Sonya, in part, represents an alternative way that someone might react to a bad situation.

Because both of them are in bad spots in their own way. Remember, Raskolnikov—he’s broke, dropped out of school, sister is marrying the rich dude who’s a horrible person—and his response is to rationally justify killing someone and then to take all their money.

But Sonya, she’s in a bad spot too. Her dad is an alcoholic. He spends what little money the family has on vodka each day. She has multiple siblings struggling as well, and she’s a Christian woman who starts prostituting herself just to be able to care for the rest of her family.

By the way, not only does her dad spend all his money on vodka, but then he steals the money that his daughter just got from prostituting herself and goes and spends that money on more vodka.

Which, by the way, here in America is a classic sign that you probably have a little bit of a problem.

But it turns out it’s too late for him anyway. Sonya’s situation gets even worse when they find her father dead after he gets run over in the middle of the street by a wagon.

And Raskolnikov, seeing her situation, at one point in the book asks, why don’t you just end all of this? Why not just jump into a frozen river or something and end this horrible life you have going on?

And her response back to him is: but what would happen to my siblings if I did that?

At which point Raskolnikov stops, thinks about what she just said to him, and realizes just how special of a person she really is.

This is when he realizes he has so much that he wants to learn from her. He realizes that this is what true strength actually looks like.

If you’re at all offput by Dostoevsky’s choice to make a main character into a prostitute for two books in a row now; just know that he does this for very good reason.

Dostoevsky’s the kind of author who’s not interested in idealistic storylines.

He doesn’t want to use one-dimensional characters that’ll fit neatly into a Disney movie. He’s interested in a kind of realism—in the actual messiness and sometimes chaos that makes up the reality of our world.

And the poverty that Sonya’s in, combined with her choice to become a prostitute—this obviously shows us a couple things.

It shows how the choices we have to make in this world are not always optimal, and they’re often dictated by circumstances that are outside of our control. But what it also shows is that when Sonya consents to become a prostitute, being a devout Christian who is acting out of a place of love and care for her family—while this is a horrible situation, and the extremity of the situation is designed this way— this is still a choice that in some small way, to Dostoevsky, becomes hers.

What he seems to be saying is that no matter what it is, in this sometimes horrible world, there is always at least some personal salvation that is possible in consent and affirmation of our place in a network.

To act out of a genuine love we have for others is a type of self-sacrifice that is not renunciative or life-denying, but one that consents to how we’re needed by the things that are already meaningful to us.

Now think of how this way of living contrasts with Raskolnikov and the situation that he found himself in.

He was faced with a bad situation, became in denial of his true place in the network, and then told himself all sorts of stories that sounded good— that he didn’t really believe in deep down.

I think Dostoevsky would ask: who’s truly the one you think is in a place of life denial here? Is it the religious person that affirms? Or is it the utilitarian that denies?

No doubt what Dostoevsky is getting at here is that to be a religious person does not guarantee that you’re going to be renouncing things about yourself.

A lot of people may use it that way in practice. But in terms of the standards we can set for ourselves, it’s possible to affirm life as an individual within a religion by making it your own.

In fact, I think he’d say that’s always what you’re doing anyway when you’re in a culture, despite whatever rational illusions you may construct that make you think you’re outside that culture or totally independent—like Raskolnikov or the Underground Man.

So Raskolnikov finds himself in a place where he is completely consumed by guilt. The detective in the story continues to have conversations with him increasingly suspicious about his involvement in the murders.

And as he’s living every day in this terrible prison he’s created for himself in his mind, he starts to think that maybe the only way out of this prison in his head is to go to a prison in the real world.

In fact, both the detective and Sonya suggest to him that even if with the evidence they have against you they’ll never be able to convict you, maybe for your own sanity it’s best to just confess to the crime you’ve committed.

This is yet another key piece of Dostoevsky’s philosophical message disguised as part of a murder.

His point is that a genuine confession from Raskolnikov would accomplish two big things for him.

The first thing is that admitting he’s done something wrong allows him to find a limitation of his own ego. This is a key sentiment behind kenosis in Dostoevsky’s Russian Orthodox legacy.

Taking accountability for something you’re wrong about is one of the only ways it’s possible to grow as a person. It’s one of the most powerful things you can do in your life. To not just be endlessly rationalizing your own behavior is a huge advantage to have in life.

The second thing a confession accomplishes is the possibility of atonement.

Dostoevsky’s point is that if Raskolnikov is living in a place where he’s consumed by guilt and fear for how he’s violated this order he’s a part of, then the only way out of that is to believe in the legitimacy of some sort of an authority that can punish you and rid you of this guilt.

Imagine making a giant mistake that you feel horrible about.

If you don’t believe in an authority’s ability to absolve you of the thing you’ve done wrong, then there’s no possibility of you feeling better. You’re always trapped in a place where you can’t ever repent for it and make amends for anything.

Imagine trying to ask your accountant to give you forgiveness for that time you punched your grandpa at Christmas last year. It wouldn’t work. It doesn’t make any sense.

Even if you say you’re going to pick up trash, apologize, do a million good deeds that allow you to give yourself salvation without some external body; you are still appealing to some framework of legitimacy that allows you to say: this makes it right again.

In other words, whatever it is that’s absolving you of your guilt has to come from somewhere else in this larger network that you’re a part of. And he’d say good luck trying to figure out the location of that coming solely from a place of rational utilitarianism.

There must be something else— something bigger than yourself that you’re always referencing.

And the subtext here is that it’s not enough for a detective to build a case against Raskolnikov, arrest him, send him to jail for twenty years, and then Raskolnikov gets released and walks around the rest of his life guilt-free.

No, the detective says that the law alone cannot provide Raskolnikov with what he needs here to feel better about what he’s done. To his point, there are people that sit in jail for their entire lives and still manage to avoid the law.

Because the law is something more than just being punished, to Dostoevsky. Unless Raskolnikov is willing to submit to the legitimacy of the law as something that can truly punish him for what he’s done, then any time he stops for even a second and looks at himself in the mirror, or pays attention to his own thoughts for a while, he will be hit with this same guilt and fear that he has not yet atoned for.

He may spend decades of his life distracting himself from what he’s done, running away from it in his thoughts, rationalizing it with a few pre-canned stories he likes to tell himself about why it was okay.

But as Raskolnikov tried to do this in the book it didn’t work; there was a certain point that the detective didn’t even have to arrest him.

He just talks to him and shows him exactly who he is by asking him questions that get him out of this world of theory and into the particulars of what he has done.

Eventually, Raskolnikov realizes that he has two choices. He can either spend the rest of his life running from this guilt and fear, living like a distracted prisoner up in his own mind.

Or he can face it directly, confess to what he’s done, and—much like Sonya—achieve at least some form of personal salvation by consenting to the authority of the network that he’s a part of.

To Dostoevsky, this is going to be consenting to the authority of God.

Ultimately, Raskolnikov decides to confess to the crime. He’s sentenced to eight years in a Siberian prison, which probably is more like eight hundred years in a normal prison. But before he goes, he professes his love to Sonya, who vows to stick by him and to be there once he gets out of prison.

Anyway, it’s alluded to in the epilogue of the book that even though Raskolnikov confessed to his crime, and even though he’s laid the groundwork for at least some kind of atonement for what he’s done, he definitely has a whole lot more work to do if he ever wants to live a life that’s deeply in connection with being.

And it’s clear that Dostoevsky felt satisfied that he’d expanded on some of the themes from Notes from Underground in this book. We now see the contradictions of Russian nihilism carried out in practice, not just up in the head of a dude isolated in an apartment.

In the next post we’re going to take these ideas, expand them, and talk about it at an entirely different level of scale. A more extreme scale. With darker consequences. The third book we’re covering of the five great novels of Dostoevsky is titled Demons.

Recommended Reading

Frank, Joseph. Dostoevsky: A Writer in His Time. Princeton University Press, 2010.

Bakhtin, Mikhail. Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics. Translated by Caryl Emerson, University of Minnesota Press, 1984.

Birmingham, Kevin. The Sinner and the Saint: Dostoevsky, a Crime and Its Punishment. Penguin Press, 2021.