A desperate young man plans the perfect crime——the murder of a despicable pawnbroker, an old woman no one loves and whom no one will mourn. Is it not just,he reasons, for a man of genius to commit such a crime, to transgress moral law--if it will ultimately benefit humanity? So begins one of the greatest novels ever written: a powerful psychological study, a terrifying murder mystery, a fascinating detective thriller infused with philosophical, religious, and social commentary.
Raskolnikov, an impoverished student living in a garret in the gloomy slums of St. Petersburg, carries out his grotesque scheme and plunges into a hell of persecution,madness, and terror. Crime and Punishment takes the reader on a journey into the darkest recesses of the criminal and depraved mind, and exposes the soul of a man possessed by both good and evil...a man who cannot escape his own conscience.
Crime and Punishment is the first of Dostoevsky’s important novels, and the one in which his genius can perhaps be felt in its purest and most limpid form. He began to write it five years after returning from his exile in Siberia (1850-1860), four years of which he had spent in a work camp, and just after the failure of the second of the two" literary-political journals that he edited with his older brother Mikhail during the early 1860s.The novel was written in a period of great personal distress, at a time when Dostoevsky’s personal life had suddenly collapsed around his ears and he was desperately searching to establish it on a new footing. His first wife--whom Dostoevsky had once called a "knight in female clothing;’ and some of whose character traits appear in Katerina Ivanovna Marmeladova——had died of tuberculosis in April 1864 after a long and heartrending death agony. Mikhail, with whom he worked in close association and harmony, suddenly expired a few months later. And although Dostoevsky had labored like a galley slave to keep their journal Epoch (Epokha) afloat even after his brother’s demise,his efforts proved unavailing and left him saddled with a huge debt……
