Raskolnikov: Surely it is not beginning already! Surely it is not my punishment coming upon me? It is! (Dostoevsky, chapter 2)
One of the greatest Russian writers Fyodor Dostoevsky sought to show a way of moral renewal of the human society. A human being is the center of life; the sight of the writer is arrested to individuality. Crime and Punishment is one of his novels that emerge from intensive thoughts about the value of human life and the moral limits of willfulness.
The plot is centered around the main character, Rodion Raskolnikov, whose mind is busy with the crime theory. Raskolnikov is very poor; he can pay neither his education at the university nor his own accommodation. His mother and sister are also poor. Soon he learns that his sister Dunya Raskolnikova is ready to marry a person she does not love for the sake of money to help her family. It was the final nail in the coffin of his patients. Raskolnikov commits a deliberate murder of an old woman-moneylender and the compelled murder of her sister, the witness.
However, Raskolnikov cannot use the stolen things; he hides them. An awful life of a criminal begins since then. The delicate psychology and the judgment of his own actions are colorfully depicted by Dostoevsky. More new heroes are involved in the action of the novel. He meets a lonely, intimidated poor girl Sonia Marmeladova, who became a prostitute in order to support her family and in whom he finds a soul mate and support.
One feels the severity and hopelessness of life of the main hero starting from the very first pages of the novel. The former student Raskolnikov lives in a tiny room “ under the roof of a high five-story house”. The main characteristics of the room represented in the novel are narrowness and tightness. The hero, who lives in such