Crime and Punishment
Fyodor Dostoevsky's 1866 novel is one of the founding texts of modern psychological fiction. Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikov, a poor and brilliant former law student rotting in a St. Petersburg garret, talks himself into the conviction that an extraordinary man stands above ordinary morality and proves it by murdering a malevolent old pawnbroker and her sister with an axe. The crime is over by page eighty. The remaining six hundred follow Raskolnikov's slow disintegration as the investigator Porfiry Petrovich circles him, his conscience eats him from inside, and the saintly prostitute Sonya Marmeladov reads him the Gospel of Lazarus. Around them Dostoevsky stages a gallery of characters, scrounging, drinking, scheming, repenting, that constitutes one of literature's most furious portraits of urban poverty and ideological pride. Translated by Constance Garnett, by David Magarshack, and most influentially in modern editions by Pevear and Volokhonsky.
Themes & atmosphere
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In nineteenth-century Saint Petersburg, impoverished former student Raskolnikov develops a theory that extraordinary men are above the law and tests it on a pawnbroker. The rest of the novel watches him try to live with it.
Crime and Punishment was written by Fyodor Dostoevsky and serialized in 1866. It was published as a single volume in 1867 and is one of the foundational works of Russian and world literature.
Crime and Punishment is 376 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, Crime and Punishment takes most readers 6 to 8 hours to finish.
Crime and Punishment is a standalone novel by an unknown author, not part of a series.
Crime and Punishment is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.