Crime and Punishment Summary & ending explained

The heat that July was the kind that settled in the stairwells and stayed. Rodion Raskolnikov slipped out of his garret, past the landlady's kitchen door, holding his breath so she would not call out about the rent.

He was a law student who no longer went to lectures, so thin his coat hung from him like a sack. He counted his steps as he walked. He had counted them before.

The old woman's flat was on the fourth floor. Alyona Ivanovna opened the door a crack, and two small, sharp eyes looked him over from the dark.

"I've brought a pledge," he said. "My father's watch."

She turned it over, named a price that was an insult, and went behind a curtain to fetch the money. He listened. A drawer on the right. Keys on a steel ring. One key far bigger than the rest. He noted it all, and hated himself for noting it.

Outside, he shook. How vile. How could I even think of it? Yet he had thought of nothing else for a month.

He went down into a basement tavern to steady himself. A man with a red, swollen face and a clerk's old frock coat sat down beside him and began, with great dignity, to tell him everything. His name was Marmeladov. He had lost his post through drink. His wife, Katerina Ivanovna, was proud, sick, and coughing blood. His own daughter, Sonya, had gone out onto the streets so the little ones could eat, and had come home and laid thirty roubles on the table without a word.

"And today I went to her and took her last coins for drink," Marmeladov said, and wept.

Raskolnikov helped him home through the dark, saw the screaming wife, the hungry children, the room like a corridor. On the way out he left a few coppers on the windowsill, then cursed himself on the stairs for it.

The next morning, a letter from his mother was waiting for him.