Crime and Punishment
A student in St Petersburg murders a pawnbroker to prove a theory about himself, and cannot live inside the proof.
Dostoevsky’s 1866 novel of a destitute St Petersburg student who murders a pawnbroker to test a theory about extraordinary men, and then finds that the theory does not survive contact with what he has done. The investigation by the magistrate Porfiry, the friendship with Sonya, and Raskolnikov’s own oscillation between confession and self-justification make the book less a crime story than a study of a mind at war with itself.
Recommended by 1 Person
Robert Service
I read this in my second year at college when I was still doing Russian literature and my very enlightened tutor said that I could just stop doing the rest of the 19th-century curriculum and concentrate on Dostoevsky for a year. I have never regretted it. I think Dostoevsky understood psychological and social contradictions in life to a peak of intensity later writers have seldom been able to match.
Interview · January 2010
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