Moral relativism in Crime and Punishment At the end of Crime and Punishment, Raskolinkov is found guilty of murder and sentenced to seven years in prison in Siberia. However, even before the character was conceived, Fyodor Dostoyevsky had already convinced Raskolinkov in his mind (Frank, Dostoyevsky 101). Crime and Punishment is the final chapter in Dostoyevsky's journey toward understanding the forces that drive man toward sin, suffering, and grace. Using ideas developed in Notes from Underground and episodes from his life recorded in Memoirs from the House of the Dead, Dostoyevsky presents in Crime in Punishment a stern defense of natural law and an irrefutable volume of evidence condemning Raskolnikov's actions (Bloom, Notes 25). The notion of motive is at the heart of the prosecution of any crime, particularly murder. Not only must the prosecutor prove the actus rectus or “guilty act,” but also that the criminal possessed the mens rea or “guilty mind” (Schmalleger 77). The pages of Crime and Punishment and the philosophies of Dostoyevsky provide ample proof of this. The first is easy; Dostoyevsky forces the reader to observe first-hand Raskolnikov "draw the ax out all the way, swing it with both hands, barely conscious of himself, and almost effortlessly, almost mechanically, bring the end of the butt down on the head” (Crime and Penalty 76). There is no doubt that Raskolnikov caused the death of Alena Ivanovna and, later, Lizaveta, but whether he possessed the guilty intent is another matter entirely. By emphasizing the depersonalization experienced by Raskolnikov during the murder, the fact that he was "barely conscious of himself" and that he had acted "almost mechanically", the sympathetic reader might conclude that it is an unknown force of the nature, and not the person of Raskolnikov, who is responsible for the murder. death of the usurer and his sister (Nutall 160). Dostoyevsky's answer to this question is not contained in Crime and Punishment, but rather in an earlier work, Notes from Underground. The entire story of The Underground Man was intended to parody the works of Nicolai G. Chernyshevsky and thus prove that man's actions are the result of his free will. The idea that the man is solely responsible for his actions is essential to proving that Raskolnikov is truly responsible for his crime. Because according to the doctrine of scientific determinism adopted by Chernyshevsky, Raskolnikov cannot be held responsible for his actions. Scientific determinism instead maintains that all actions that men undertake are inevitable and unalterable because they are “totally determined by the laws of nature »..