Excellent, classic book. Here's something I wrote about it:
Raskolnikov is a wildboy lol. He’s broke as hell and planning to commit a simple crime–killing and robbing the pawnbroker lady who always screws people over. Nothing really goes at planned in the moment, though. He gets in the apartment, kills her, but then her sister pops up. So then he has to kill her too. Okay. Well now people are knocking on the door to pawn stuff, and he’s stuck inside. Fuck. But he finds a way to sneak out when they step away for a second, and then he makes it home.
From there on, he’s psychologically tortured with what he did. A lot of coincidences, paranoia, and sickness. He’s also barely eating and seems to only drink alcohol lol. So yea he has a lot going on. The whole time I was reading I was just like, DUDE CHILL lol. He kept being in cops faces or would be panicking in public, mad people coming to visit him in his room where he had some of the stuff he stole, giving money away in public, doing other various stupid shit. If he played cool, he could have gotten away with it.
He actually addresses this concept of telling on one’s self early on. This is my favorite lil section from the book:
At first—even long before—he had been occupied with one question: why almost all crimes are so easily detected and solved, and why almost all criminals leave such an obviously marked trail. He came gradually to various and curious conclusions, the chief reason lying, in his opinion, not so much in the material impossibility of concealing the crime as in the criminal himself; the criminal himself, almost any criminal, experiences at the moment of the crime a sort of failure of will and reason, which, on the contrary, are replaced by a phenomenal, childish thoughtlessness, just at the moment when reason and prudence are most necessary.
According to his conviction, it turned out that this darkening of reason and failure of will take hold of a man like a disease, develop gradually, and reach their height shortly before the crime is committed; they continue unabated during the moment of the crime itself and for some time after it, depending on the individual; then they pass in the same way as any disease passes. But the question whether the disease generates the crime, or the crime somehow by its peculiar nature is always accompanied by something akin to disease, he did not yet feel able to resolve.
-Rachel Wagner