Editing Crime and Punishment (section)

=== The environment of Saint Petersburg ===
Dostoevsky was among the first to recognize the symbolic possibilities of city life and imagery drawn from the city. I. F. I. Evnin regards ''Crime and Punishment'' as the first great Russian novel "in which the climactic moments of the action are played out in dirty taverns, on the street, in the sordid back rooms of the poor".{{sfn|Fanger|2006|p=24}}

Dostoevsky's Petersburg is the city of unrelieved poverty; "magnificence has no place in it, because magnificence is external, formal abstract, cold". Dostoevsky connects the city's problems to Raskolnikov's thoughts and subsequent actions.{{sfnp|Lindenmeyr|2006|p=37}} The crowded streets and squares, the shabby houses and taverns, the noise and stench, all are transformed by Dostoevsky into a rich store of metaphors for states of mind. Donald Fanger asserts that "the real city ... rendered with a striking concreteness, is also a city of the mind in the way that its atmosphere answers Raskolnikov's state and almost symbolizes it. It is crowded, stifling, and parched."{{sfn|Fanger|2006|p=28}}

In his depiction of Petersburg, Dostoevsky accentuates the squalor and human wretchedness that pass before Raskolnikov's eyes. He uses Raskolnikov's encounter with Marmeladov to contrast the heartlessness of Raskolnikov's convictions with a Christian approach to poverty and wretchedness.{{r|Frank1995_104}} Dostoevsky believes that the moral "freedom" propounded by Raskolnikov is a dreadful freedom "that is contained by no values, because it is before values". In seeking to affirm this "freedom" in himself, Raskolnikov is in perpetual revolt against society, himself, and God.{{sfn|Wasiolek|2006|p=55}} He thinks that he is self-sufficient and self-contained, but at the end "his boundless self-confidence must disappear in the face of what is greater than himself, and his self-fabricated justification must humble itself before the higher justice of God".<ref>[[Vladimir Solovyov (philosopher)|Vladimir Solovyov]] quoted in {{harvp|McDuff|2002|pp=xiii–xiv}}; {{harvp|Peace|2006|pp=75–6}}.</ref> Dostoevsky calls for the regeneration and renewal of "sick" Russian society through the re-discovery of its national identity, its religion, and its roots.<ref>{{harvp|McDuff|2002|p=xxx}}: "It is the persistent tracing of this theme of a 'Russian sickness' of spiritual origin and its cure throughout the book that justify the author's characterization of it as an 'Orthodox novel'." {{harvp|Wasiolek|2006|pp=56–7}}.</ref>