The author of Utilitarianism (1863), Mill considered the goal of social legislation to be to provide “the greatest good for the greatest number,” calling it a “felicific calculus.” Dostoevsky takes up these ideas through the character of Peter Petrovich Luzhin, Raskolnikov’s prospective brother-in-law, who argues for enlightened self-interest: “Up until now, for instance, if I were told, ‘love thy neighbor,’ what came of it? . . . It meant I had to tear my coat in half to share it with my neighbor and we both were left half naked” (p. 145). Raskolnikov reduces this parody of economic theory to its essence: “If you carry out logically the theory you were advocating just now, it follows that people may be killed” (p. 147)—in other words, that human compassion can be replaced by economic utility and enlightened self-interest. Luzhin, whose name comes from the Russian word for puddle (luzha) embodies the economic principle, the primacy of monetary relations in social thought; he provides one of the ideas that influences Raskolnikov’s thinking. One of Raskolnikov’s initial reasons for his crime is (murkily) associated with the “good” of redistributing the pawnbroker’s wealth to the poor.

This dramatic pairing—money, arithmetic, and calculation with their opposite: intuitive, Christian compassion—runs through the novel, and is present in each of its parts. The motifs of Crime and Punishment—blood, yellow, water, horses, bells, thresholds, wallpaper, thirty roubles or kopeks, staircases—contain opposites that suggest the deepest level of meaning in the book. Water is both a means of suicide (by drowning in the Neva) and the source of regeneration (the Irtysh River in the Epilogue). Raskolnikov is afraid of the traces of the pawnbroker’s blood on his socks but is almost joyful about the spots of Marmeladov’s blood on his clothing after he helps Marmeladov from the street to his apartment. Bells can be associated with Raskolnikov’s murderous aspect or with the potential for salvation associated with church bells. When Raskolnikov first goes to the pawnbroker’s apartment, “he rang the bell of the old woman’s flat. The bell gave a faint tinkle as though it were made of tin and not of copper. The little apartments in such houses always have bells that ring like that. He had forgotten the note of that bell, and now its peculiar tinkle seemed to remind him of something” (p. 8). After the murder, he returns at night while the workmen are there: “[He] pulled the bell. The same bell, the same cracked note. He rang it a second and a third time; he listened and remembered. The hideous and agonizingly fearful sensation he had felt then began to come back more and more vividly. He shuddered at every ring” (p. 166). At the first visit, the tone of the bell perhaps reminds him of the tinny sound of village church bells such as he remembers it in his dream; at the second visit, Raskolnikov obsessively evokes the memory of his crime by repeatedly ringing the tinny bell. Later, lying on his bed, he “thought of nothing . . . faces of people he had seen in his childhood or met somewhere once, whom he would never have recalled, the belfry of the church at V.,... a back staircase quite dark, all sloppy with dirty water and strewn with egg shells, and the Sunday bells floating in from somewhere” (p.