The action is contemporary, in the present year. A young man expelled from the university … and living in extreme poverty, from thoughtlessness, from flippancy, having yielded in his understanding to certain strange, “half-baked” ideas that toss about in the air, has decided to get out of his despicable position at one go. He has decided on killing a certain old lady, the wife of a titular counselor who lends money at interest. The woman is stupid, deaf, sick, greedy, takes exorbitant percentages, is malicious and eats up the life of another person, tormenting her younger sister who is living with her as a worker. “She's good for nothing.” “Why is she alive?” “Is she of use to anyone at all?” etc. These questions confuse the young man. He decides to kill her, to rob her – in order to make his mother, living in the provinces, happy, to deliver his sister, living as a companion with certain landowners, from the lascivious attentions of the head of this land-owning family – attentions that threaten to ruin her, to finish his university course, to go abroad, and then for his entire life to be honorable, firm, unbending in the fulfillment of his “humanitarian duty” – through which, of course, he will “smooth out the crime” – if only one can use the word “crime” for this action against a deaf, stupid, malicious, and sick old woman who doesn't know herself why she lives in the world and who within a month might up and die on her own …

He passes almost a month after the crime until the final crisis. There are no suspicions of him and cannot possibly be. But it is here that the entire psychological process of the crime unfolds. Insoluble questions arise before the killer; unsuspected and sudden feelings torment his heart. God's truth, the earthly law make themselves felt, and in the end he himself is compelled to turn himself in. He is compelled in order to be joined again to people, even if he perishes in prison; the feeling of disattachment and alienation from humanity, which he experienced immediately on committing the crime, has worn him out … The criminal himself decides to accept suffering in order to atone for his deed.