the idea of Crime and Punishment

Dostoevsky conceived the idea of Crime and Punishment in the summer of 1865, having lost all his money at the casino, unable to pay his bill or afford proper meals. At the time the author owed large sums of money to creditors, and he was trying to help the family of his brother Mikhail, who had died in early 1864. The work was originally conceived in terms that suggest Émile Zola. Projected under the title The Drunkards, it was to deal "with the present question of drunkness ... [in] all its ramifications, especially the picture of a family and the bringing up of children in these circumstance, etc., etc." Once Dostoevsky conceived Raskolnikov and his crime, this theme became ancillary, centering on the story of the Marmeladov family.[3]

Dostoevsky offered his story or novella (at the time Dostoevsky was not thinking of a novel[4]) to the publisher Mikhail Katkov. His monthly journal, The Russian Messenger, was a prestigious publication of its kind, and the outlet for both Ivan Turgenev and Leo Tolstoy, but Dostoevsky, having carried on quite bruising polemics with Katkov in early 1860s, had never published anything in its pages. Dostoevsky turned as a last resort to Katkov, and asked for an advance on a proposed contribution after all other appeals elsewhere failed.[5] In a letter to Katkov written in September 1865, Dostoevsky explained to him that the work was to be about a young man who yields to "certain strange, 'unfinished' ideas, floating in the air";[6] he had thus embarked on his plan to explore the moral and psychological dangers of the "radical" ideology.[7] In letters written in November 1865 an important conceptual change occurred: the "story" has become a "novel", and from here on all references to Crime and Punishment are to a novel.[8]

Dostoevsky had to race against time, in order to finish on time both The Gambler and Crime and Punishment. Anna Snitkina, a stenographer who would soon become his second wife, was a great help for Dostoevsky during this difficult task.[9] The first part of Crime and Punishment appeared in the January 1866 issue of The Russian Messenger, and the last one was published in December 1866.[10]

“ At the end of November much had been written and was ready; I burned it all; I can confess that now. I didn't like it myself. A new form, a new plan excited me, and I started all over again. ”
— Dostoevsky's letter to his friend Alexander Wrangel in February 1886[11]
In the complete edition of Dostoevsky's writings published in the Soviet Union, the editors reassembled and printed the notebooks that the writer kept while working on Crime and Punishment, in a sequence roughly corresponding to the various stages of composition. Because of these labors, there is now a fragmentary working draft of the story, or novella, as initially conceived, as well as two other versions of the text. These have been distinguished as the Wiesbaden edition, the Petersburg edition, and the final plan, involving the shift from a first-person narrator to the indigenous variety of third-person form invented by Dostoevsky.[12] The Wiesbaden edition concentrates entirely on the moral/physic reactions of the narrator after the murder. It coincides roughly with the story that Dostoevsky described in his letter to Katkov, and written in a form of a diary or journal, corresponds to what eventually became part II.[13]