- Views on Crime and Punishment -

In a letter to M.N.Katkov, written on September 1865, Dostoevsky talks about his coming novel. (If you still have not read Crime and Punishment, I would advise you not to read the following lines, for it might take away some surprises from the ending):

"It's a psychological acount of a crime. The action is topical, set in the current year. A young student of lower middle class origin, who has been expelled from the university, and who lives in dire poverty, succumbs - through thoughtlessness and lack of strong convictions - to certain strange, incomplete, ideas that are floating in the air, and decides to get out of misery for once and for all. He resolves to kill an old woman, the widow of a titular council, who lends money for interest. The old crone is stupid, deaf, sick, and she charges Jew rates; she is wicked, and makes the life of her younger sister, whom she treats as a servant, wretched. "She's good for nothing," "what does she live for?" "Is she of any use at all?" and so on.These questions disorient the young man. He decides to kill and rob her in order to bring happiness to his mother, who is living in the provinces, and to wrest his sister, who is living as a companion in the house of some landowners, from the lewd demand of the head of the household, demands that may lead to her perdition. He also wants to finish his studies and to go abroad, and, afterward, for the rest of his life, to be honest, firm, and steadfast in the performance of his "humanitarian duties toward mankind", which certainly would "expiate his crime", if one can actually call a crime his act against a stupid, deaf, vicious, sick old crone who herself does not know why she is living and who may die anyway in a month or so.

Despite the fact that such crimes are very difficult to carry out, i. e., the criminal pratically always leaves behind glaring clues, evidence, etc., behind them, and leave too much chance, which almost always leads to their discovery, he, by sheer accident, carries iff the execution of his enterprise quickly and successfully.

Afterward, almost a month goes by before the final catastrophe. He is not, and cannot be suspected. And it is just at this point that th entire psychological process of crime unfolds itself. Insoluble problems arise before the murderer; unsuspected and unforeseen feelings torment his mind, divine truth and human law take their toll, and he ends up being driven to give himself up. He is driven to this because, even though doomed to perish in penal servitude, it will make him one with the people again, and the feeling of being cut off and isolated from humanity that he had experienced from the moment he had commited the crime had been torturing him. The law if truth and human nature won out [illegible words]. The criminal himself decides to accept suffering and expiate his deed. However, it is rather difficult for me to make my idea completely clear.

Besides this, my story contains the suggestion that the legal penalty imposed for the comission of a crime frightens hte offender himself less than the lawmakers think, partly because he himself demands it morally.

I have seen that myself in even the most backward individuals in the crudest circumstances. I would like to show that this feeling is present in an educated man of the new generation, so that the idea would be more striking and more tangible. Several recent occurances have convinced me that there is nothing terribly unsusual about my subject. namely the fact that my murderer is well educated and is even a young man with praiseworthy inclinations. Last year in Moscow, I heard of a student who, expelled from the university after the Moscow student disorders, decided to break into a post office and kill a postal employee. There is also considerable violence in our newspapers that the extreme inconstancy of our principles has resulted in horrible acts. (The seminary student who made a pact with a young girl to kill her, killed her in a barn, and was picked up one hour later while he was eating his lunch, and other things.) In brief, I am convinced that my subject will in a way explain what is happening today."

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