Image by Willey Reveley.
by Oz Susskind
Space is never neutral. In Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, interior and exterior environments are not arbitrary backdrops––they are inseparable from the characters who reside in them. Dostoevsky consistently endows interior spaces and the thresholds that divide them from the outside with symbolic significance. These spatial elements are integral to Raskolnikov’s moral crisis. In particular, the rift between the public and the private deepens as Raskolnikov’s mental deterioration progresses. The outside world becomes an unrelenting threat after he commits his murders, forcing Raskolnikov into further reclusion. As his paranoia grows, the outside begins to function as a socially-manufactured panopticon, regulating Raskolnikov’s behaviour through its surveillant qualities. Thus, to avoid both legal and public recognition of his crimes, Raskolnikov remains in the dismal confines of his room. In turn, Raskolnikov is trapped between exposure and enclosure, and he is effectively deprived of an outlet for rest or reflection. Dostoevsky explores how spaces and the movement between them affect Raskolnikov; his guilt and misery are heightened and maintained by his environment. Raskolnikov’s eventual spiritual enlightenment in prison coincides with a total collapse of the public-private spatial divide. As public spaces become sites of surveillance and Raskolnikov’s room shifts from a potential refuge to a source of confinement, the spaces he inhabits and the thresholds he traverses parallel his internal turmoil; space not only materializes Raskolnikov’s struggles, but also actively impacts his psychological state, rendering an escape from his torment impossible without total detachment from both public and private spatial orders.
From the novel’s outset, Dostoevsky employs interior spaces as recurring emblems of Raskolnikov’s identity, using spatial environments to signify internal psychic states. Dostoevsky introduces the room where Raskolnikov lives as a “cupboard” (Dostoevsky 5). His diction frames Raskolnikov’s inner life as cramped and dreary. Dostoevsky describes Raskolnikov’s “garret” in some detail before even introducing the protagonist himself (5). Indeed, Dostoevsky initially refers to him as “a young man” (5), and he is only introduced by name when he reminds the pawnbroker of his earlier visit (9). Dostoevsky thus foregrounds the novel’s environments, layering them with his intimate descriptions of Raskolnikov’s mental state. Raskolnikov’s room is a “tiny little cell” with “dusty, yellowy, peeling wallpaper” (35). The description of these interior conditions reflects Raskolnikov’s inability to care for himself and, crucially, his social isolation. He has “withdrawn from people completely, like a tortoise into its shell” to the extent that “even the face of the maid […] was enough to make him turn yellow and shake” (35). The mere sight of the maid threatens to shatter the fragile sanctum of Raskolnikov’s room. In this way, Dostoevsky crystallizes the border not only between the confines of Raskolnikov’s room and the outside, but also between himself and the external world as a whole. Dostoevsky further links Raskolnikov’s spatial and mental conditions by juxtaposing his squalid quarters with the pawnbroker’s spotless apartment. Raskolnikov marvels at the “immaculate” apartment, attributing the cleanliness to Lizaveta and thinking, “Only nasty old widows keep everything so clean” (10). This unspoken musing explicitly associates one’s living environment with one’s moral character. As such, Raskolnikov’s assessment both aims to soothe his anxious conscience about the crime he is planning and reinforces the notion that interior spaces reflect their occupants’ identities. Moreover, the sterility of the apartment stages the murder Raskolnikov eventually commits. After he kills the pawnbroker, as the blood pools around the body, Raskolnikov tries scrupulously “not to stain himself with the flowing blood” (95). His neurotic impulse to preserve his visible cleanliness is as much a psychological consideration as a practical one; the thought of bearing a physical marker of the murder horrifies him. However, the act’s futility is evinced when he realizes––after washing his hands and the axe––that he left the door to the apartment “ajar by as much as a hand’s breadth” (99). Despite Raskolnikov’s feeble attempts to cleanse himself of the brutal killing, the apartment itself reveals his guilt plainly. This apparent blunder underscores how the psychic impact of the murder eclipses Raskolnikov’s desire to evade being caught. He is so intently focused on erasing the traces of the act from his own body, thereby preserving a semblance of inner innocence, that he neglects the most direct evidence of his culpability––the apartment itself. Dostoevsky connects the spatial surroundings of the murder and Raskolnikov’s subsequent endeavour to both avoid detection and minimize the crushing burden of his moral conflict. Once Raskolnikov spills the blood of his two victims, his spatial world is irrevocably tainted, even when he tries to psychically detach himself from the murder.
After the murder, the spaces Raskolnikov inhabits rapidly shift meanings, both mirroring and exacerbating his mental decline; in turn, Dostoevsky intensifies the divergence between private and public space. Raskolnikov’s room, which, despite its neglect, functioned as a hideout, evolves into an intrinsically hostile space. Initially, Raskolnikov plants the evidence of his crime behind a “hole” under the “peeling wallpaper” of his room (110). But he almost immediately regrets this haphazard hiding place, and his “whole body shudder[s] with horror” (110). The act of placing the physical signifier of the murders in the room renders the space an extension of Raskolnikov’s frantic attempts to evade incrimination and remediate his guilt. In this way, the “peeling wallpaper” that might otherwise conceal him instead materializes his unravelling mind as he desperately probes his room for any evidence of his crime. Yet Dostoevsky continues to alter the room’s connotation. Later in the novel, Pulkheria Alexandrovna states, “What a horrid room you have, Rodya – just like a coffin” (276). This description cements how the room directly reflects Raskolnikov’s worsening condition and his spiritual death. When his mother blames the room for his condition, he agrees, saying, “Yes, the room had a lot to do with it . . .” (276-277). This agreement makes the effects of interior space in the novel explicit: the room is not merely a symbol of Raskolnikov’s decline, but a condition that helps produce it. His mother’s simile of a “coffin” clarifies how the room actively entombs him. The claustrophobic, morbid space intensifies the recursive structure of his guilt: the more he withdraws from the world, the more he is forced into his own shame. Later, describing his room to Sonya, Raskolnikov feverishly asserts, “Do you have any idea, Sonya, how small rooms and low ceilings cramp the soul and the mind? Oh, how I hated that hovel! But I still didn’t want to leave it” (501). Raskolnikov vocalizes the impact of his room on his psychological state, yet he simultaneously acknowledges his inability to part from it, noting how he would “just lay there” (501). This seemingly contradictory relationship is critical: the room is a destructive pressure, yet it gives physical form to his desire to disappear. His room harms him, but it also protects him from the demands of the outside world, allowing him to suspend action and retreat into delirium. By staying in his room, Raskolnikov effectively rehearses and literalizes his spiritual burial. However, the “hovel” represents relative safety compared with the perils of the public sphere.
As private domestic space compresses Raskolnikov in the wake of his murders, crossing over the threshold between the privacy of his room and the outside world represents a constant danger. Even before he is formally suspected, the state’s authority looms large: at the bureau, the assistant shouts, “Kindly hold your tongue, sir! You’re on state premises. Watch your step, I say!” (119). The command is as spatial as it is legal; while on “state premises,” Raskolnikov must carefully monitor his every move and comment or risk exposure. Raskolnikov’s violent act endows public space with surveillant qualities, making it a functional panopticon. Michel Foucault famously reconceived the original schematic of the panopticon in Discipline and Punish as a “generalizable model of functioning” that has the fundamental effect of “induc[ing] in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility” (Foucault 201, 205). Raskolnikov’s movement through St. Petersburg precisely adapts this pattern, encaging him without any physical means. Indeed, even while on the street, Raskolnikov is vulnerable. When a tradesman says, unprompted, to Raskolnikov, “You’re the killer!” (Dostoevsky 326), he is physically shaken and reduced to a state of mental torment. Although there is no indication that the tradesman’s assertion is anything other than arbitrary, the mere implication that his secrets could be exposed sends him spiralling. Paralleling the Foucauldian panopticon, visibility becomes a principal disciplinary mechanism that holds Raskolnikov in a state of “subjection” (Foucault 187). In an especially revealing image from the novel, Raskolnikov dreams a reimagined version of the murder, in which he “wanted to run, but the entrance hall was already packed with people, the doors on the staircase were wide open, and on the landing and all the way down the stairs there was nothing but people, a row of heads, all watching – but biding their time in silence” (Dostoevsky 333). The most emotionally striking feature of this sequence is the fact that the onlookers to Raskolnikov remain motionless––their action is purely watchful. Dostoevsky illustrates how the impending threat of retribution transcends the actualization of that threat. Raskolnikov internalizes this threat to the point of near-omnipresent paranoia: “He might walk out of the city […] to some little wood; the more isolated the place, the more strongly he seemed to be aware of someone’s close and unsettling presence – […] he would hurry back to the city, mix with the crowds” (530). Here, in a seeming contrast to earlier references to crowds as the apparatus of surveillance, they evoke a sense of anonymity and concealment. Yet this shift represents the final crystallization of the panopticon in the novel. The core feature of the panopticon is manufacturing the effects of surveillance without literal surveillance itself (i.e., the possibility of being observed supplants actual observation); Raskolnikov’s unabating sensation of an “unsettling presence” signals his total inculcation into the social panopticon. The deleterious impact of visibility is such that Raskolnikov becomes subject to an amorphous, surveillant spectre even in the absence of a perceptible observer. Outside, Raskolnikov feels constantly watched and haunted by the possibility that someone else will uncover the truth. Dostoevsky thus plots Raskolnikov’s post-murder existence between two punitive spaces: the confining “coffin” of his room and the sustained social panopticon of the public sphere.
Notably, even before the transformation of the public sphere, Dostoevsky regularly focalizes the lines demarcating the public and private. Detailing the spatial significance of the novel, Mikhail Bakhtin writes, “The threshold, the foyer, the corridor, the landing, the stairway, its steps, doors opening onto the stairway, gates to front and back yards, and beyond these, the city […] This is the space of the novel [Crime and Punishment].” (Bakhtin 170). Much of the novel’s decisive action occurs on or around these transitional spaces, granting them a preeminent, “living” quality (Dostoevsky 170). They are not static scenery or expendable adornments, but rather wholly integrated, active features of the world. Dostoevsky’s thresholds carry multivalent connotations in the novel; however, they are consistently portrayed as boundaries between the public and private worlds. Marmeladov’s death encapsulates the effects of these thresholds as his family tragedy becomes a public circus. After Marmeladov is brought home and laid to rest on the couch, “the room had filled to bursting,” and though the spectators initially “seemed content merely to crowd the doorway,” they eventually rush into the room (217). Dostoevsky juxtaposes the personal trauma of Marmeladov’s gruesome death with the chaotic throng of onlookers, exposing how permeable domestic life is in St. Petersburg. The spectators’ temporary ambivalence at the “doorway” highlights the fragility of the division between the public and private. In the same scene, Dostoevsky depicts how hordes of “curious” tenants came to the entrance, “without crossing the threshold” (221). This recurring emphasis on the spectators’ hesitancy dramatizes the uneasy suspension between interpersonal distance and their desire to intrude. The onlookers appear aware that crossing the threshold transforms the Marmeladovs’ home into a scandalous stage on which poverty and death are publicly displayed. Deborah Martinsen comments that “scandals expose both personal shame and social ills. Dostoevsky’s novels abound in theatrical scandal scenes in which private dramas become public” (Martinsen 73). In the context of Dostoevsky’s thresholds, Martinsen’s explanation clarifies that thresholds are unstable zones where the private self is exposed to collective scrutiny. The carnival of Marmeladov’s death mirrors the social mechanics that later torment Raskolnikov as his personal shame transforms the public realm into a panopticon. Raskolnikov must constantly fear breaking into the external social sphere because once he does, his guilt becomes a scandal open to public interpretation. Thresholds continue to signify a crossing between the public and the private––one with volatile implications for those who choose to cross.
Dostoevsky depicts both the interior space and the outside world as active, coercive psychological forces in the novel; consequently, Raskolnikov’s only possible refuge is to withdraw from both. Following his imprisonment, Raskolnikov initially feels his “pride […] had been badly wounded,” and he is left “ill” and “ashamed” (649). Indeed, the physical conditions of prison largely do not bother him: “it wasn’t the horror of convict life, the forced labour, the food, the shaven head or the patched-together clothes that broke him” (649). Dostoevsky suggests that the material deprivation of prison does not affect Raskolnikov as much as the collapse of his psychological project that attempts to maintain his sense of exceptionalism and pride. Prison fundamentally terminates Raskolnikov’s perpetual oscillation between the private constraints of his room and the danger of the outside world––he no longer fears exposure. The dissolution of the partition between the public and private spheres in prison finally leaves Raskolnikov free of the crushing spatial burdens that St. Petersburg had imposed. Raskolnikov is confined anew, but the form of surveillance and concealment that had defined his life in St. Petersburg is absent. Martinsen describes how Raskolnikov’s move to prison “represents a release from the crowding of the mainland and prefigures the open space of Siberia, where Raskolnikov will experience his spiritual transformation” (Martinsen 64). While this shift is partly attributable to the literal landscapes of the two regions, the social geography is equally relevant. Because Raskolnikov no longer has to conceal his secrets, the panopticon that once consumed his experiences of the outside world is fractured. When Sonya appears beside him, Dostoevsky notes, “They were alone; no one could see them. The guard had turned away” (656). In this singular moment, Raskolnikov inhabits a space that is utterly liminal: he is physically confined but temporarily unsupervised in a place that is neither wholly public nor wholly private. In St. Petersburg, privacy is a coffin and public space risks surveillance; in Siberia, however, with the gaze of authority turned away, the dichotomy is suspended. It is in this moment, in the marginality of prison, that Raskolnikov can experience genuine intimacy and his “full resurrection into new life” occurs (657). In this sense, Raskolnikov exists on a threshold in prison. The effects of the “open space” that Martinsen identifies are partially a byproduct of Raskolnikov’s experience of living on the periphery. He exists between the social and spatial dimensions of the public and the private, and this externalization allows him to access the religious discovery that his oppressive life in St. Petersburg had precluded him from. As such, the architecture of prison ironically creates the first place in which he can achieve genuine reflection––he is liberated. After meeting with Sonya, Raskolnikov retreats to the barracks and “lay[s] on his bunk and [thinks] of her” (Dostoevsky 657). Here, the confinement of his environment prompts a new kind of focus that deviates from his typical mental strife. Raskolnikov ponders that “everything, even his crime, even his sentence and exile, now seemed, in this first surge, somehow alien and strange” (658). Dostoevsky illustrates how Raskolnikov feels increasingly distanced from both his crime and the resulting punishment––the identity constructed in the spaces of his former life is fading, replaced by something new. Dostoevsky notes, “Dialectics had given way to life” (658). In the context of the shift in Raskolnikov’s environment, his removal from the spatial pressures that kept him reclusive and calculating means he is capable of experiencing the weight of moral decisions firsthand rather than intellectualizing them. Inspired by Sonya, Raskolnikov then thinks, “How can her beliefs not be my beliefs too now? Or at least her feelings, her strivings…” (658). Even if Raskolnikov has not undergone a complete spiritual transformation, he has begun reforming his beliefs. This turn towards Sonya signals that he no longer treats belief as an abstraction but as something embodied. The prison’s spatial features make possible a new form of relational, emotional openness, allowing him to escape the isolated egoism that had previously plagued him. Paradoxically, behind bars, Raskolnikov finally unlocks the freedom to derive meaning internally and without persistent mental distress.
Ultimately, Dostoevsky suggests that Raskolnikov’s crime and the myriad of internal and external punishments he endures are inextricable from the space he moves through. The spaces of Raskolnikov’s life in St. Petersburg operate as windows into the torment he experiences, fluctuating representations of his deepening shame. Yet they also serve as coercive mechanisms that further his misery: his room compresses him into delirious isolation, while the public world constructs him as a perpetually surveilled subject. Even when the meanings attached to particular spaces shift, Raskolnikov is nonetheless ensnared by his environment, as signified by the centrality of thresholds that organize the novel’s spatial world. Space is the medium through which Raskolnikov’s guilt becomes fully realized and maintained as he desperately attempts to clear his conscience. Within these spaces, Raskolnikov cannot live without mental suffering because the spaces he inhabits cultivate it. He is forced to alternate between two uniquely punishing realms of secluded privacy and the panopticon of the outside. As such, when Raskolnikov goes to prison, removing him from the interior space of his room and the social landscape of St. Petersburg, he can finally break from the cycle of frantic concealment and terror in which he had been trapped. His life in prison is one spent on a threshold––between public and private, between physical confinement and mental liberation. Space, therefore, has the power to both make and unmake a person. Only when walls confine Raskolnikov, without the possibility of flight, does he finally begin to recover. Raskolnikov is locked away from the world that made him a prisoner.
Works Cited
Bakhtin, Mikhail. Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics. Translated by Caryl Emerson, University of Minnesota Press, 1984.
Dostoyevsky, Fyodor. Crime and Punishment. Translated by Oliver Ready, Penguin, 1866.
Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Vintage Books, 2014.
Martinsen, Deborah. “Space, social justice, and scandal: Crime and Punishment.” Fyodor Dostoevsky: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press, 2024, academic.oup.com/book/56206/chapter/443812410.