By Fyodor Dostoevsky, Constance Garnett (Translator), Penn State University

Along with Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace, the novel is considered one of the best-known and most influential Russian novels of all time

The famous novel goes a long way to helping readers understand the root causes of the Russian Revolution.

Dostoyevsky's relentlessly bleak story about poverty and hopelessness in pre-Revolutionary Russia is boiled down to its essence. Alex Jennings is brilliant as Raskolnikov, a man unfortunate enough to have a conscience. Driven by poverty, greed, and a touch of madness, Raskolnikov murders two women for their money and spends the rest of the book trying to live with his crime. Jennings gamely works through the difficult Russian names, making them sound as common as Smith and Jones, while adding just the right amount of pathos and leaden tone to the voices of his characters.

The Merriam-Webster Encyclopedia of Literature

Novel by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, published in 1866 as Prestupleniye i nakazaniye. Dostoyevsky's first masterpiece, the novel is a psychological analysis of the poor student Raskolnikov, whose theory that humanitarian ends justify evil means leads him to murder a St. Petersburg pawnbroker. The act produces nightmarish guilt in Raskolnikov. The narrative's feverish, compelling tone follows the twists and turns of Raskolnikov's emotions and elaborates his struggle with his conscience and his mounting sense of horror as he wanders the city's hot, crowded streets. In prison, Raskolnikov comes to the realization that happiness cannot be achieved by a reasoned plan of existence but must be earned by suffering. The novel's status as a masterpiece is chiefly a result of its narrative intensity and its moving depiction of the recovery of a man's diseased spirit. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title. 

Useful Links: 

• Study Guides
  • Characters and Plot Summary
  • SparkNotes study guide
  • Text and Analysis at Bibliomania
  • A search engine for the novel's text
  • A modern reinterpretation of the novel
  
  

• Online Text
  • Full text, translated by Constance Garnett
  • Dual Language E-Book - Crime and Punishment English and Russian texts side-by-side.
  • Full text in the original Russian
  • Crime and Punishment, available for free via Project Gutenberg
  • Online version of Twilight of the Idols by Nietzsche (quoted in the article) - an interesting comparison with Dostoevsky's Christian existentialist thought.

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