Crime and Punishment characters — the complete list

Why everyone has three names

Russians of Dostoevsky’s era carry a first name, a patronymic — their father’s name with ‑ovitch or ‑ovna attached — and a surname. Which one you use depends on who you are to them: Rodion Romanovitch to a police inspector, Rodya to your mother, Raskolnikov to the narrator. Dostoevsky’s first readers heard the warmth or chill in every variation.

The cast

The Raskolnikovs

Raskolnikov = Rodion Romanovitch = Rodya

A former law student, first of his class, who has stopped attending lectures, stopped eating regularly, and started believing that an extraordinary man may “step over” the rules that bind everyone else. He commits the murder in Part I; the remaining five parts are what the murder does to him. Proud, generous, cruel and tender within the same page — he gives his last roubles to the Marmeladovs, then despises himself for it.

Dounia = Avdotya Romanovna = Dounetchka

His sister, and the spine of the family — her brother’s intelligence and pride with the self-command he lacks. She has endured Svidrigaïlov’s advances as a governess and accepted Luzhin’s proposal as an act of quiet family economics.

Pulcheria Alexandrovna their mother

Writes the letter in Part I that sets the whole plot moving — Dounia’s troubles, Luzhin’s offer, the family riding to Petersburg on hope — then arrives in person to not be told anything by anyone.

The Marmeladovs

Sonia = Sofya Semyonovna = Sonetchka

Marmeladov’s daughter by his first marriage, driven onto the streets with a yellow ticket to feed her stepmother’s children. She judges no one, which unnerves Raskolnikov more than any prosecutor.

Marmeladov = Semyon Zaharovitch

The drunk clerk whose tavern confession in Part I — “have you ever spent a night on a hay barge, on the Neva?” — out-aches everything around it. He has a post, loses it, regains it, drinks the salary, and knows precisely what he is doing to his family at every step, which is the horror of him. Father of Sonia.

Katerina Ivanovna his wife

Consumptive, proud, and magnificent in fury — an officer’s daughter who danced at a governor’s ball once and will remind you of it while coughing blood.

Polenka and Lida and Kolya, the children

Katerina Ivanovna’s three children by her first marriage — ten, and younger. Polenka’s embrace on the stairs, and her promise to pray “all the rest of my life,” is the one uncomplicated kindness Raskolnikov receives in the whole novel.

Amalia Ivanovna the Marmeladovs’ landlady

German, house-proud, and locked in a war of etiquette with Katerina Ivanovna, who needles her by getting her patronymic deliberately wrong.

Suitors, friends, and predators

Razumihin = Dmitri Prokofitch

Raskolnikov’s loyal, talkative university friend. Poor like Rodya, he responds by tutoring, translating, and scheming a small publishing venture rather than theorizing about axes. He nurses Raskolnikov through fever, shepherds the mother and sister, and falls headlong for Dounia. Introduces himself, three bottles in, as “Vrazumihin” — roughly, Bringer-to-Reason.

Luzhin = Pyotr Petrovitch

Dounia’s fiancé, a lawyer of new money and newer opinions who wants a wife poor enough to be grateful, and says so in writing.

Svidrigaïlov = Arkady Ivanovitch

Dounia’s former employer, arrived in Petersburg with money, leisure, and no remaining reasons to behave. He is what Raskolnikov’s theory looks like when it stops apologizing: a man genuinely beyond conscience, and bored there.

Marfa Petrovna Svidrigaïlov’s late wife

Dies suddenly, off the page, early in the novel — of a stroke, a beating, or her husband, depending on who is gossiping — and is busier than most living characters: she clears Dounia’s name across the whole province, wills her three thousand roubles, and calls on Svidrigaïlov three times as a ghost.

Lebeziatnikov = Andrey Semyonovitch

Luzhin’s roommate, a collector of progressive opinions worn like this season’s coat — communes, rational marriage, the whole catalogue.

The investigation

Porfiry Petrovitch no surname given, in the entire novel

The examining magistrate — thirty-five, round, amused, and the ancestor of every detective who ever solved a case by chatting. His three conversations with Raskolnikov are played entirely with psychology, patience, and the occasional deliberate blunder. Distant kinsman of Razumihin, which is how he first gets his man to tea.

Ilya Petrovitch “the Explosive Lieutenant”

The police lieutenant with the temper, forever half-erupting at somebody over nothing.

Zametov = Alexandr Grigorievitch, the head clerk

Young, ringed, pomaded, and present for the strangest scene in the middle of the book: Raskolnikov, in a tavern called the Crystal Palace, leaning across the table to ask what if it was he who murdered the old woman — then laughing it off as fever. Zametov half-believes both halves.

Nikolay “Mikolka,” the painter

A young house-painter from the flat below the murder scene who confesses to the crime he did not commit — out of a sectarian’s hunger to suffer, Porfiry explains, half in awe. (A drunken peasant called Mikolka also beats the mare to death in Raskolnikov’s dream in Part I.)

Zossimov the doctor

Twenty-seven, well-dressed, and languidly pleased with himself. Attends Raskolnikov’s fever and diagnoses everything except what is actually wrong — though his guess of “some fixed idea” lands closer than he ever learns.

The man from under the ground an artisan in a long coat

Steps out of nowhere in the street, looks Raskolnikov in the eye, and says one word: “Murderer!” He saw something at the flat, told the police, doubted himself, and appears once more to apologize.

The pawnbroker’s flat

Alyona Ivanovna the pawnbroker

Sixty, tiny, sharp-eyed, keys on her belt, flannel round her neck in July. She lends kopecks on roubles, beats her sister, and has willed nearly everything to a monastery for the good of her soul.

Lizaveta Ivanovna her half-sister

Thirty-five, gentle, simple, worked like a slave by her sister — and in the wrong room at the wrong moment: the second, unplanned murder that no version of the theory ever covered. She was Sonia’s friend; they exchanged crosses, and the New Testament Sonia reads from was hers. She speaks so rarely the app never assigns her a color.

The rooming houses

Nastasya the landlady’s servant

Cook and only servant of the house, forever appearing in Raskolnikov’s doorway with tea, soup, gossip, and unsolicited common sense.

Praskovya Pavlovna “Pashenka,” the landlady, the widow Zarnitsyn

Raskolnikov’s landlady, owed months of rent, to whose late daughter he was once engaged — a whole sad backstory the novel spends two paragraphs on. Shy to the point of invisibility: she never once appears in her own house, and Razumihin charms her entirely through closed doors.

The colors are the dialogue colors as the app assigns them today, checked against the live book. Twelve voices speak often enough to earn one; the rest print in the page’s own ink.