Crime and Punishment

First published in serial form in 1866, Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment descends into the fevered streets of St Petersburg, where poverty, pride and intellectual ambition converge in the mind of Rodion Raskolnikov, a former student who convinces himself that extraordinary individuals may stand beyond ordinary morality. After murdering a pawnbroker, he finds himself trapped in an increasingly tormented struggle with his own conscience, while the astute investigator Porfiry Petrovich draws him into a psychological contest of mounting tension. Among the novel’s unforgettable figures is Sonia Marmeladov, whose compassion and faith offer a quiet counterpoint to Raskolnikov’s theories and isolation.

Part crime novel, part psychological drama and part spiritual inquiry, Crime and Punishment probes the limits of reason, the nature of guilt and the possibility of redemption. Dostoevsky transforms a murder investigation into an intimate examination of the human soul, capturing the claustrophobia of a city and the volatile ideas of nineteenth-century Russia with extraordinary intensity. A defining work of Russian literary realism and one of the great psychological novels, it established many of the moral and philosophical preoccupations that would reach their fullest expression in The Brothers Karamazov. Its central question remains unsettlingly alive: what happens when an abstract idea is tested against the irreducible reality of another human life?

From the book

“Pain and suffering are always inevitable for a large intelligence and a deep heart.”

— Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment

On Crime and Punishment

“No other novelist has dramatized so powerfully the values and dangers, the uses and corruptions of systematized thought.”

— Irving Howe, literary critic