Crime and Punishment recap

In St. Petersburg, the poverty-stricken former student Raskolnikov, convinced by his own theory that extraordinary people may transgress moral law, murders a grasping old pawnbroker and, in a panic, also kills her gentle half-sister Lizaveta. He gets away with the crime but is immediately crushed by guilt, dread, and feverish illness. As he evades and is subtly hunted by the magistrate Porfiry Petrovich, he is drawn to Sonya Marmeladova, a meek, deeply religious young woman forced into prostitution to support her family. Around him his mother and sister Dunya arrive in the city, Dunya escaping the loveless designs of Luzhin and the disturbing pursuit of the cynical Svidrigailov. Unable to bear his isolation, Raskolnikov confesses first to Sonya, then, urged by her toward repentance, gives himself up to the authorities. He is sentenced to penal servitude in Siberia, where Sonya follows him, and where his hardened heart slowly opens toward love and the possibility of spiritual renewal.

In the heat of a St. Petersburg summer, Rodion Raskolnikov, a proud and impoverished former student living in a squalid attic room, drifts through the city in a feverish, half-starved daze. He has withdrawn from his studies and from other people, and broods obsessively on a theory that a rare few extraordinary individuals are permitted to overstep ordinary morality for a higher end. Behind on his rent and ashamed of the sacrifices his mother and sister make for him, he fixes on the idea of murdering Alyona Ivanovna, a miserly old pawnbroker he regards as a worthless, predatory creature, imagining that her money could do great good and that such a killing would prove his own exceptional nature. Around this premise the novel gathers the desperate poor of the city, including the ruined drunkard Marmeladov and his self-sacrificing daughter Sonya, as Raskolnikov moves toward committing the crime that will consume the rest of the story.

Raskolnikov's theory collapses under the weight of his own conscience. Tormented by guilt and worn down by Porfiry's patient psychological pressure, and moved by Sonya's insistence that he confess and accept suffering, he publicly admits to the murders and is sentenced to eight years of hard labor in Siberia. Sonya follows him there and settles nearby, visiting faithfully. Several other threads close darkly: Marmeladov dies after being run over by a carriage, and Katerina Ivanovna soon dies of consumption in a fit of despair; Luzhin is exposed and rejected after trying to disgrace Sonya; and Svidrigailov, having failed to win Dunya and after a few final acts of unexpected generosity, shoots himself. Dunya marries the loyal Razumikhin. In the epilogue, Raskolnikov at first remains proud and unrepentant in the prison camp, but through Sonya's steadfast love he finally breaks down, weeps, and begins a gradual moral and spiritual regeneration, the novel closing on the promise of his slow return to life.