Crime and Punishment

Crime and Punishment

The boy who counted the steps

A young man counted the steps from the door of his rented room to the gate of another house. Seven hundred thirty. Not roughly. Exactly seven hundred thirty.

Anyone who does that has not slept properly in weeks. Rodion Raskolnikov has walked the same route for a month in the suffocating St. Petersburg summer, believing all the while that he is only thinking. Then one afternoon a drunk shouts after him from a passing cart: "Hey there, German hatter!" The boy freezes. Not from shame. Because his battered old top hat is conspicuous. Easy to remember. Somebody might recall it later.

Stop there for a second. A man preparing for murder is not terrified of killing. He is terrified of being recognized by his hat. A few pages in, Dostoevsky shows you the whole human mind at work: the big decision has already been made underneath, while trifles swirl on the surface. "It is just such trifles that always ruin everything," the boy tells himself, with no idea how right he is.

The scene first appeared in 1866, in installments, in a Russian magazine. Its author was forty-five, home from Siberian penal servitude a few years earlier, after living through a mock execution where the pardon reached the scaffold at the last possible moment. Dostoevsky did not learn in a library what it is like when a man has one life left and one wrong decision inside it.

Crime and Punishment is one of the most widely read novels in the world, and most people remember it as "the one where the student kills the pawnbroker." That is about as accurate as summarizing Romeo and Juliet as two teenagers with bad timing. The murder happens in the first seventy pages; the five hundred that follow are why people have kept reading this book for a century and a half.