Important questions remained unresolved in Dostoevsky's mind when the first part of the novel appeared in the January 1866 issue of the Russian Herald. His notebook for February shows him still working out Sonya's role and, more significantly, Raskolnikov's real motive for his crime. In some sketches, he was to be a much more articulate spokesman for the Nihilists, who combined “rational egoism” with a view of themselves as benefactors of mankind. This idea was supplanted by the Napoleonic figure of the “strong individual” who acts for the sake of his own power. In one version, Raskolnikov was to end with a vision of Christ and a heroic deed of self-sacrifice and reconciliation; in the other, his rebellion would become truly demonic, and he would finally shoot himself. Dostoevsky eventually decided against both outcomes, and Raskolnikov's motives were left unresolved, to the great advantage of the novel. And to Sonya, whom he had thought of making a more articulate opponent of Raskolnikov's idea, who would confront him sharply and even write him letters “possessing high artistic qualities,” he finally gave only the almost mute witness of example. Instead of the vision of Christ, there is her reading of the Gospel account of the raising of Lazarus in part four. The rational egoism goes mostly to the miserly Luzhin, the bullet to Svidrigailov.

As the material of the novel grew into its new form, emphasis shifted away from Dostoevsky's original idea of “the psychological account of a crime” and from his ongoing polemics with the Nihilists. The point-edness of Notes from Underground had yielded to an inclusive, expanding image of the world caught in a moment of time—a world of rather down-to-earth and yet at the same time fantastic tradesmen, tavern keepers, house painters, money-lenders, the easily amused servant Nastasya, the open-palmed policeman Zamyotov, the fanatic little radical Lebezyatnikov, the explosive Lieutenant Gunpowder. Dostoevsky's art gives even the most minor characters a spectacular presence, and they are constantly upstaging each other.

Yet Crime and Punishment is still the most singly focused of Dostoevsky's later novels. Its characters and events all converge on the enigma of Raskolnikov. He appears in thirty-seven of the novel's forty scenes, and we are allowed entry only into his consciousness and, more briefly, Svidrigailov's. On the other hand, the plane of happening is considerably enlarged; or, rather, the limits of accountable reality, the limits of man-in-nature, fall away. Dreams, waking visions, even ghosts, are as much a part of this world as are the buildings, bridges, and canals of Petersburg; the line dividing the outer from the inner, the solid from the fantasmagorical, wavers. This is a fluid world, full of coincidences, chance but fatal meetings, crucial words accidentally overheard, embodied in the communicating streets and squares, the adjoining rooms and apartments of the city. Petersburg is not a backdrop for the events Dostoevsky narrates, but a constant participant in them, and a mirror of Raskolnikov's soul. The enigma of the city and the enigma of the hero are one.

This is not to say that Raskolnikov is a neurotic who cannot keep from projecting his inner states upon the world. The truth is that we all see as we feel, or, better, that our vision is always complex, always moral, always spiritual: we “see” beauty and ugliness, we “see” good and evil. The struggle to empty himself of such complexities leads to the terrible splits and estrangements in Raskolnikov. His name comes from the word raskolnik, meaning “schismatic,” one who has split away from the body of the Church; but he is also divided against himself. He is, as the critic Konstantin Mochulsky wrote, “a demon embodied in a humanist.” Reason, in which he trusts, leads him to murder, yet reason cannot provide him with an axe when he needs one. Chance does that, and chance continues to abet him and to mock him. His transgression, his step over (the Russian word for “crime” means literally “over-stepping”), confronts him with dimensions of the world and of himself that he did not anticipate and cannot understand. He had been studying law at the university, but it is a representative of the law, that most unlikely and fascinating of investigators, Porfiry Petrovich, who says to him:

It must be observed that the general case, the one to which all legal forms and rules are suited, and on the basis of which they are all worked out and written down in the books, simply does not exist, for the very reason that every case, let's say, for instance, every crime, as soon as it actually occurs, turns at once into a completely particular case, sir; and sometimes, just think, really completely unlike all the previous ones, sir.

This may be taken to apply to the laws of reason and nature as well. The world Raskolnikov begins to discover when he leaves his “closet” and goes to commit his rational crime does not stand upon any laws, but, again, on “something different.” It is the same Porfiry Petrovich who tells him, near the end of the novel, that he still has many years ahead of him, and that he should “embrace suffering” and live: “Don't be too clever about it, just give yourself directly to life, without reasoning.” But there is perhaps no scene in all of Dostoevsky more perfectly ambiguous than this one.

Ambiguity is not incidental to Dostoevsky's vision. It is most obvious here in the comical, even farcical, scandals and absurdities surrounding the gruesome death of Marmeladov and the memorial meal following his funeral. But comical incidents abound throughout the novel. Even the central story of Raskolnikov and his struggle with “fate” keeps verging on comedy. Then, too, much of the action has an oddly theatrical quality, and Dostoevsky often uses stage terminology for setting scenes (he refers a number of times to “the public,” so unexpectedly that earlier translators have paraphrased the term away). Are these real people, or actors in some sort of show? It is essential to Dostoevsky's art that the “view” is constantly shifting and may drop into horror or rise into laughter at any moment. Yet this ambiguity does not make light of suffering. On the contrary, what writer has ever revealed it so nakedly? And that precisely because he does not allow us our usual rational or sentimental evasions. Suffering is unmitigated in Crime and Punishment; there is no answer to it; there is no law of suffering. Ambiguity touches its essence but not its reality.

Evil is the final ambiguity. Reason cannot accept it; rationalizing ideologies deny its existence. No one calls it by name, and this silence weighs heavily on the novel, because the world of Crime and Punishment is saturated with evil, so much so that it becomes palpable. It is the dense element through which Raskolnikov moves without recognition. The vision of evil, which he lacks, seems to be granted in the end to Svidrigailov. The action in the second to last chapter of the novel is literally and metaphysically drenched—with a torrential downpour, with Svidrigailov's fear of water, with his dreams of the flooding of the Neva, the drowned girl, the wet child he tries to help. The “natural man,” the man of instinct and appetite, thinks he can reach the point at which evil turns into innocence, but what is possible for a stone or a tiger is not possible for a human being. Svidrigailov is soaked through with what Simone Weil described as “the monotony of evil: never anything new, everything here is equivalent. Never anything real, everything here is imaginary. It is because of this monotony that quantity plays so great a part. . . Condemned to a false infinity. This is hell itself.” Svidrigailov cannot get out of it. Raskolnikov, though he is full of lies and self-deceptions, may still “lie his way to the truth,” as his friend Razumikhin puts it. There is movement in his soul. There is none in Svidrigailov's, for all his winning honesty.