Crime and Punishment characters — the complete list

The Raskolnikovs

• Raskolnikov= Rodion Romanovitch = Rodya The student. The axe. The seven-hundred-page argument with his own theory. 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; the novel gives her the pleasure of dismantling both men, once with a speech and once with a revolver.
• Pulcheria Alexandrovnatheir 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. Dostoevsky lets her guess everything she is never told, which is the quiet tragedy of her last chapters.

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 — and the novel’s quiet center of gravity. She judges no one, which unnerves Raskolnikov more than any prosecutor. She is the person he tells first, and hers is the reading of the raising of Lazarus — from a New Testament that belonged to Lizaveta — at the book’s exact hinge.
• 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; carried home twice, the second time for good.
• Katerina Ivanovnahis 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. Her memorial dinner for Marmeladov, thrown with money she cannot spare, collapses into the novel’s greatest scene of public unraveling — see below.
• Polenkaand 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; he trades on the memory of it for weeks.
• Amalia Ivanovnathe Marmeladovs’ landlady German, house-proud, and locked in a war of etiquette with Katerina Ivanovna, who needles her by getting her patronymic deliberately wrong. Their duel over the memorial dinner’s table settings escalates, roughly, into an eviction.

Suitors, friends, and predators

• Razumihin= Dmitri Prokofitch Raskolnikov’s loyal, talkative university friend — the one functioning person in the book. 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, falls headlong for Dounia, and — in the epilogue — gets the nearest thing the novel offers to a happy ending. 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. Dismissed by Dounia in one scene, he attempts revenge by planting a hundred-rouble note on Sonia at the memorial dinner — the pettiest crime in a novel about crime, and the one that fails most completely.
• Svidrigaïlov= Arkady Ivanovitch Dounia’s former employer, arrived in Petersburg with money, leisure, and no remaining reasons to behave — the abyss with manners. He is what Raskolnikov’s theory looks like when it stops apologizing: a man genuinely beyond conscience, and bored there. He takes the room on the other side of Sonia’s wall and hears every word of the confession. His last night — the fly, the mouse, the dreams, the revolver at dawn — is the darkest sequence Dostoevsky ever wrote. He would say he went to America.
• Marfa PetrovnaSvidrigaïlov’s late wife Dead before the novel opens — of a stroke, a beating, or her husband, depending on who is gossiping — and 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. Dostoevsky mocks him for fifty pages and then hands him the novel’s cleanest act of courage: he is the witness who saw Luzhin plant the note, and he says so, loudly, at the exact moment it matters.

The investigation

• Porfiry Petrovitchno 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. He has no physical evidence and never needs any: his three conversations with Raskolnikov are the chess match of the book, 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. By accident of shift schedules, he is the man sitting in the office when Raskolnikov finally walks in — so the novel’s most famous sentence is spoken to its least perceptive officer.
• 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. His false confession buys Raskolnikov his last free weeks. (A drunken peasant called Mikolka also beats the mare to death in Raskolnikov’s dream in Part I — Dostoevsky reusing the name on purpose, guilt echoing before the fact.)
• Zossimovthe 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 groundan 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 — a walking piece of Raskolnikov’s conscience with a hat on.

The pawnbroker’s flat

• Alyona Ivanovnathe 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. The theory is about her; the axe is for her. She is also — and the novel never lets you forget it — a frightened old woman in her own kitchen.
• Lizaveta Ivanovnaher 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 — which is rather the point of her.

The rooming houses

• Nastasyathe landlady’s servant Cook and only servant of the house, forever appearing in Raskolnikov’s doorway with tea, soup, gossip, and unsolicited common sense. She likes him, roughly the way one likes a stray cat that bites.
• Praskovya Pavlovna“Pashenka,” the landlady 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.

Honest footnote: the dots are the dialogue colors as the app assigns them today, checked against the live book. Twelve voices speak often enough to earn a slot, and the palette holds exactly twelve — a coincidence Dostoevsky did nothing to deserve. Names with a dark chip print in the page’s own ink, like Lizaveta’s.