Crime and Punishment to Siberia, but Raskolnikov's mother falls ill and dies. Sonya follows Raskolnikov to Siberia, but he is initially hostile towards her as he is still struggling to acknowledge any moral culpability for his crime, feeling himself to be guilty only of weakness. It is only after some time in prison that his redemption and moral regeneration begin under Sonya's loving influence. In "Crime and Punishment", Dostoevsky fuses the personality of his main character, Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikov, with his new anti-radical ideological themes. The main plot involves a murder as the result of "ideological intoxication," and depicts all the disastrous moral
Crime and Punishment success. Although the remaining parts of the novel had still to be written, an anonymous reviewer wrote that "the novel promises to be one of the most important works of the author of "The House of the Dead"". In his memoirs, the conservative belletrist Nikolay Strakhov recalled that in Russia "Crime and Punishment" was the literary sensation of 1866. The novel soon attracted the criticism of the liberal and radical critics. G.Z. Yeliseyev sprang to the defense of the Russian student corporations, and wondered, "Has there ever been a case of a student committing murder for the sake of robbery?"