Dostoyevsky wrote Crime and Punishment under severe financial pressure, completing it in 1866 while simultaneously dictating another novel to meet a separate contractual deadline. The story follows Rodion Raskolnikov, a destitute former law student in St. Petersburg who murders an elderly pawnbroker and her half-sister, partly for the money he cannot bring himself to take, and partly to test a theory: that extraordinary individuals exist above ordinary moral law, and that history vindicates those willing to transgress conventional ethics in service of a larger purpose. Napoleon is his implicit model. The murder is committed in the novel's early pages; the remaining four hundred run on the question of what happens to the theory afterward.
Raskolnikov's theory collapses not because he is philosophically refuted but because his body and mind refuse to cooperate with it. He cannot spend the money. He returns to the scene of the crime twice. He talks when silence would protect him. Dostoyevsky is making a psychological argument, not a theological one: that the self is not a unified agent capable of carrying out a calculated transgression and simply moving on. The investigating magistrate Porfiry Petrovich understands this before Raskolnikov does, and their sparring scenes, Porfiry never quite accusing, Raskolnikov never quite confessing, are among the most technically accomplished in nineteenth-century fiction.
The novel anticipates with unsettling precision several twentieth-century ideologies built on the premise that certain categories of people exist outside ordinary moral constraints. Dostoyevsky wrote it as a rebuttal to Russian utilitarian philosophy, but the argument he constructed is portable. What the novel ultimately dramatizes is the cost of treating other human beings as abstractions: Raskolnikov convinces himself the pawnbroker is a louse, a parasite, and the language of dehumanization does its usual work until he is standing in her apartment with an axe. The irreversibility of what follows cannot be theorized away, however sophisticated the theory.
Jane Austen wrote all six major novels without a dedicated writing room, she hid her work under blotting paper whenever visitors arrived.
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