Crime and Punishment

Summary

A fever-dream of soot-choked Petrograd alleys mutates into a Lower-East-Side tenement inferno: Rodion Raskolnikoff, penniless student-turned-messianic pamphleteer, baptizes himself in blood, convinced that snuffing a vampiric pawnbroker will reset the moral ledger for an entire slum. The axe falls, the safe yawns open, coins clink into breadbaskets and pharmacy tills—yet the cosmic audit refuses to balance. An innocent scapegoat is flayed by the police until he howls a false confession; the protagonist’s airtight alibi calcifies into a cage of guilt. A street-worn Magdalene, half saint, half scarlet lantern, becomes his mirror, forcing him to confront the rot beneath the grand equation “one death, a thousand resurrections.” In the final reel he trades utopian arithmetic for the messier calculus of conscience, surrendering to the very justice he once mocked.

Synopsis

"One death, and thousands of lives restored to existence. For some useless life a thousand lives saved from decay and death. Shall not one little crime be effaced and atoned by a million good deeds?" So ran Rodion Raskolnikoff's creed in the book which was responsible for his being expelled from the University, but which elected him the leader of a secret brotherhood which admired him. The law proving too hot for him, he is finally forced to flee to America, still preaching his same doctrine. Rodion's heart is touched by the poverty on the East Side and he determines to kill a pawnbroker who mercilessly squeezes the poor unfortunates to their last cent. He accomplishes the deed, takes money from the safe, uses it for the needy and manages to keep the guilt from himself. But the crime is fastened on an innocent man, who, to escape further torture of a relentless third degree confesses to a crime he had no hand in. Then comes Rodion's struggle between his conscience and his creed, and through the guidance of a "lost sister of the streets," he rejects the faith he founded and acknowledges his guilt.