Crime and Punishment

byFyodor Dostoyevsky, Richard Pevear (Translator), Larissa Volokhonsky (Translator)

Translated by Richard Pevear & Larissa Volokhonsky

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A poverty-stricken student murders a pawnbroker in St Petersburg, then finds guilt harder to escape than the law.

TRANSLATED BY RICHARD PEVEAR AND LARISSA VOLOKHONSKY

A troubled young man commits what he believes is the perfect crime: the murder of a vile pawnbroker whom no one will miss. Raskolnikov is desperate for money, but convinces himself that his motive is not merely personal gain, but the benefit of mankind.

So begins one of the defining works of psychological fiction: a journey into the criminal mind, a police thriller and a philosophical meditation on morality and redemption.

As guilt, fear and pride consume him, Raskolnikov is forced to confront the consequences of an idea taken to its most terrible conclusion. Around him move poverty, suspicion, spiritual longing and the possibility of grace.

Crime and Punishment is a classic Russian novel about murder, conscience, poverty and moral struggle. For readers of literary crime fiction and philosophical classics, Dostoevsky’s masterpiece remains one of the most searching studies of guilt ever written.

Dostoevsky makes Martin Amis seem as if he was writing 130 years ago and that Dostoevsky is writing now. Read all of Dostoevsky. These books are for now and they matter, because it's up to us to call a halt to our TV producers, politicians, gutless artists, poets and writers: these "teenagers of all ages" who are propelling us towards a consumerist hell of disposability over quality
Billy Childish

About Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky was born in Moscow in 1821. His debut, the epistolary novella Poor Folk (1846), made his name. In 1849 he was arrested for involvement with the politically subversive 'Petrashevsky circle' and until 1854 he lived in a convict prison in Omsk, Siberia. From this experience came The House of the Dead (1860-2). In 1860 he began the journal Vremya (Time). Already married, he fell in love with one of his contributors, Appollinaria Suslova, eighteen years his junior, and developed a ruinous passion for roulette. After the death of his first wife, Maria, in 1864, Dostoyevsky completed Notes from Underground and began work towards Crime and Punishment (1866). The major novels of his late period are The Idiot (1868), Demons (1871-2) and The Brothers Karamazov (1879-80). He died in 1881.

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