Author(s): F.M. Dostoevsky (tr from Russian Richard Pevear & Larissa Volokhonsky)

Classics

Crime and Punishment (1866) is the story of a murder committed on principle, of a killer who wishes by his action to set himself outside and above society. A novel of great physical and psychological tension, pervaded by Dostoevsky's sinister evocation of St Petersburg, it also has moments of wild humour. Dostoevsky's own harrowing experiences mark the novel. He had himself undergone interrogation and trial, and was condemned to death, a sentence commuted at the last moment to penal servitude. In prison he was particularly impressed by one hardened murderer who seemed to have attained a spiritual equilibrium beyond good and evil: yet witnessing the misery of other convicts also engendered in Dostoevsky a belief in the Christian idea of salvation through suffering. Review: "The best [translation of "Crime and Punishment"] currently available...An especially faithful re-creation...with a coiled-spring kinetic energy...Don't miss it." -"Washington Post Book World"
"This fresh, new translation...provides a more exact, idiomatic, and contemporary rendition of the novel that brings Fyodor Dostoevsky's tale achingly alive...It succeeds beautifully." -"San Francisco Chronicle"
"Reaches as close to Dostoevsky's Russian as is possible in English...The original's force and frightening immediacy is captured...The Pevear and Volokhonsky translation will become the standard English version."-"Chicago Tribune"

"From the Hardcover edition." First published 1866; this translation 1992.