Crime and Punishment
- Written By Fyodor Dostoevsky
Crime and Punishment
- Fyodor Dostoevsky
$19.99
Every crime leaves a trace of conscience.
St. Petersburg is a city of extremes, where imperial grandeur and crushing poverty occupy the same streets. Into this world, a young former law student named Rodion Raskolnikov has reasoned himself into a corner. Brilliant, impoverished, feverish with ideas, he arrives at a theory: some people are extraordinary โ above law, above consequence โ and ordinary people exist only to be governed by them. He believes he stands among the extraordinary and has a plan to prove it.
The plan takes one night. What follows takes the rest of the novel: the way a single act detonates through a consciousness, reshaping memory, perception, even the body itself. Meanwhile, the walls of Raskolnikovโs world close in. A relentless investigator circles around him, asking questions. His sister and mother arrive, having sacrificed everything on his behalf. And in Sonya โ a young woman whose own suffering drives her toward faith โ Raskolnikov confronts something deeper than theory and logic. Raskolnikov’s mind, already strained to breaking, begins to turn on itself.
Set in the 1860s, Crime and Punishment established Dostoevsky as one of the 19th centuryโs defining moral voices. More than a century and a half later, it remains a psychological portrait of almost unbearable precision. This is a book about what happens when an idea becomes an act, and what the mind does next.
โPain and suffering are always inevitable for a large intelligence and a deep heart.โ
About the Author
- Fyodor Dostoevsky
Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky was born in Moscow in 1821, the son of a staff doctor at a hospital for the poor. He trained as a military engineer but abandoned the profession for writing, publishing his first novel, Poor Folk, in 1846 to instant acclaim. In 1849, he was arrested over his membership in a radical literary circle, sentenced to death, and led before a firing squad โ only to receive a last-minute commutation to four years of hard labor in Siberia. He served his sentence, completed his military service, and returned to writing.
The Siberian years remade him. The convicts he lived among, the suffering he witnessed and shared, the faith he arrived at in the camps โ all of it fed the great novels of his maturity. Between the 1860s and his death in 1881, Dostoevsky published a series of works, including The Idiot, The Brothers Karamazov, and others that secured his top place in Russiaโs illustrious literary canon. Crime and Punishment introduced Dostoevsky to Western readers and has never released them, remaining the standard against which psychological fiction measures itself.
