History of Dostoevsky's The Crime and Punishment

When Dostoevsky has returned to Petersburg after penal servitude and the reference and has started in 1861 the edition of first magazine "Time", it seemed to it that for Russia there has come a new epoch, iridescent prospects have opened: after all the weight centuries of people deprived of civil rights, "slaves", Russian peasants, became free. Namely in them saw a source of updating Dostoevsky, in their moral and spiritual unification with Russian intelligency. But Dostoevsky's light mood was short. It became very fast clearly that reform has not brought desired crisis. The confidence of close radical updating, of inevitable and near destruction of "last times" (Saltykov-Shchedrin) has failed. Optimistic hopes have been broken, joyful (*142) hopes are dispelled, "last times" and did not think and did not want to die, on the contrary, they became more tenacious, more resourceful, having got the new ally - a bourgeois predator-businessman. There has come time of heavy disappointments, painful sincere crises. Dostoevsky not without reason underlined the present of the novel. "Action modern, this year", - was written by him in one of letters in September, 1865. Ways of the deepest updating - social, spiritual, moral - the advanced Russian youth of the end of the fiftieth - the beginnings of the sixtieth years searched. Tragical throwings of Raskolnikov have the same source. From here begins movement and its thought. However in destiny of young men like Raskolnikov years of reaction have played a fatal role, have pushed them to special, fruitless, tragically insolvent forms of the protest.
When Dostoevsky wrote "a Crime and punishment", he lived in that part of Petersburg where petty officials, handicraftsmen, dealers, students lodged. Here, in a cold autumn fog and a hot summer dust "middle Petersburg streets and lanes", lying around the image of poor student Rodion Raskolnikov, here has arisen Senna of the area and the Ekaterina's channel, before it and its Dostoevsky, in the Joiner's lane where in the big profitable house rented apartment has lodged.
There was two Petersburgs. One - a city created by ingenious architects, Petersburg Palace quay and the Palace Square, amazing us and nowadays the eternal beauty and symmetry - "midnight the countries beauty and a miracle" as its Pushkin named. But there was also another - "at home without any architecture", teeming with "the shop and craft population". Petty-bourgeois, Garden, Podjachesky streets, "Ditch" quays (the Ekaterina's channel); taverns, shops and trays of small traders, doss houses...
Well Dostoevsky Peterburg of palaces and parks, "capital this magnificent and decorated with numerous monuments" (as the hero of a "Crime and punishment" Marmeladov has told in the original and expressive language) knew, some years were lived by him, the pupil of Engineering school, in one of these palaces - the well-known Mihajlovsky lock, near to the Mars field and the Summer garden. But it is deaf also it there was for Dostoevsky this Petersburg, as well as for its hero Raskolnikov, blew as magnificence, a cold and animosities. And on the contrary, in closets and in streets of other Petersburg such inexhaustible maintenance, such fantastic bottomlessness of life - situations, characters, dramas, - such tragic poetry of what were not known yet by the world literature has opened to Dostoevsky.
Towards evening hottest July day, shortly before the sunset already throwing the slanting beams, the pity closet "under self a roof of the high five-floor house" leaves in heavy melancholy the former student Rodion Raskolnikov. So Dostoevsky's novel begins. And from this point on, without giving itself a respite, without an instant of rest and rest - in frenzy, in deep thoughtfulness, in passionate and boundless hatred, delirious - rushes about on the Petersburg streets, stops on bridges; over dark cold waters of the channel, rises on smelly ladders, Dostoevsky's hero comes in dirty taverns. And even in the sleep, interrupting this "perpetual motion", feverish life of Raskolnikov proceeds, accepting already forms and at all the fantastic.