Crime and Punishment - Softcover

Fyodor Dostoevsky

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0780757122 ISBN 13: 9780780757127

Publisher: Perfection Learning, 1999

Synopsis

A young university student sets out to prove that he is a superior human being capable of committing the perfect murder.

About this title

About the Author

FyodorDostoyevsky (18211881), one of nineteenth-century Russias greatest novelists, spent four years in a convict prison in Siberia, after which he was obliged to enlist in the army. In later years his penchant for gambling sent him deeply into debt. Most of his important works were written after 1864, including Notes from Underground, Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, and The Brothers Karamazov, all available from Penguin Classics.

Review

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. -- The Merriam-Webster Encyclopedia of Literature

About this edition

• Publisher: Perfection Learning
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0780757122
• ISBN 13: 9780780757127
• Binding: Paperback