Crime and Punishment Book Quiz
Eight multiple-choice questions on Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment (1866) — plot, characters and the moments everyone quotes. Two minutes, instant score, every answer explained below. For the full mixed-classics version, take the original book quiz — 15 questions across the whole canon.
All 8 questions and answers
Prefer to read the quiz instead of taking it? Expand for every question, answer and a one-line explanation.
- Who commits the murders? — Rodion Raskolnikov, a former student. He kills the pawnbroker Alyona Ivanovna with an axe — and her innocent sister Lizaveta, who walks in.
- What is Raskolnikov's theory? — Extraordinary men, like Napoleon, have the right to transgress. The article he published: the extraordinary man steps over obstacles; the ordinary man obeys.
- Who is the detective who toys with him? — Porfiry Petrovich. The examining magistrate's psychological cat-and-mouse.
- Who is Sonya Marmeladova? — A girl driven to prostitution who becomes his path to confession. She reads him the raising of Lazarus and walks him to the police station.
- What does Raskolnikov's sister Dunya endure? — Pursuit by both the lecherous Svidrigailov and the vain Luzhin. She finally threatens Svidrigailov with a pistol and is courted by, and marries, Razumikhin.
- What sentence does Raskolnikov receive? — Eight years in Siberia. With Sonya following him east, an epilogue of slow rebirth.
- What city is the novel set in? — St Petersburg. The sweltering, cramped Petersburg summer is practically a character.
- Who is Svidrigailov? — A cynical sensualist whose suicide shadows Raskolnikov's choice. He hears Raskolnikov's confession first, and shoots himself before the peasant's fire.
About Crime and Punishment
Dostoevsky's 1866 novel of Raskolnikov, a destitute ex-student in St Petersburg who murders a pawnbroker to test his theory of the 'extraordinary man' — then collapses under a guilt no investigator could match. The novel runs about 212,000 words (roughly 671 pages in a standard paperback) — about 14 hours and 51 minutes of reading at an average pace. Before you commit, see the full breakdown in how long it takes to read Crime and Punishment or calculate reading time for any other book.
Hard — psychological intensity, long dialogues, Petersburg claustrophobia. If you get 6 or more of the eight questions right, the book clearly stuck.
What this quiz covers
Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment sits in our russian classics shelf, and the eight questions follow the book the way a reader experiences it: how the story opens, the turn in the middle, the characters who carry it, and the ending people still argue about. You will not be asked for page numbers or publication trivia — but three or four questions are built to separate people who read the book from people who read a summary. If a question stumps you, that gap is your reading list talking.
Fair warning for the ambitious: readers who clear this quiz often move straight to the reading-time breakdown for Crime and Punishment to plan the reread, then test the rest of their shelf against the mixed classic literature quiz.
More book quizzes
War and Peace quiz, Anna Karenina quiz, 1984 quiz, Animal Farm quiz, Brave New World quiz — or browse every book quiz on the site. For scale, Crime and Punishment is the 6th longest of the 133 classics timed here — shorter than Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix but longer than Moby-Dick.
Doing the whole author? Our Fyodor Dostoevsky books in order guide lists every book with the best entry point.
Frequently asked questions
How many questions are in the Crime and Punishment quiz?
Eight multiple-choice questions covering Fyodor Dostoevsky's plot, characters and most famous moments. The quiz takes about two minutes and your score is instant.
Is the Crime and Punishment book quiz free?
Yes — no signup, no email, nothing to install. Answer the eight questions and get your score immediately.
What score should I aim for?
8/8 means you know the book cold; 6+ is a solid score. Below 4, the book is calling you back for a reread.
Is the Crime and Punishment quiz hard?
Hard — psychological intensity, long dialogues, Petersburg claustrophobia. The questions themselves stick to famous, load-bearing moments — the scenes and lines the book is remembered for — so a genuine read usually scores 6+.
How long is the Crime and Punishment reading itself?
About 212,000 words — roughly 671 pages, or about 14 hours and 51 minutes at an average pace. The full pace breakdown is in how long it takes to read Crime and Punishment. It runs 41 chapters, averaging 5,170 words each; see the book-count guide for its full structure.