Punishment and crime begins from the point of view of a young man living in squalid conditions at a St. Petersburg boarding house.

The young man, Raskolnikov, is a poor student who has to sneak out of his house to avoid his landlady, whom he owes a long-overdue rent. He walks the streets of the city in tattered clothes, although he feels no shame, holding little regard for the destitute people who inhabit the neighborhood of St. Petersburg he is traversing. He visits the home of an old woman, a miserly pawnbroker with a reputation for cruelty called Alyona Ivanova, with the seeming intention of pawning his watch.