Crime and Punishment
On an exceptionally hot July evening in St. Petersburg, an impoverished former student named Rodion Raskolnikov creeps from his cramped garret and commits a calculated double murder, killing a greedy old pawnbroker and her sister with an axe. Convinced he is an extraordinary man entitled to transgress ordinary morality, he expects to feel justified. Instead he is plunged into fever, paranoia, and crushing guilt. As the shrewd magistrate Porfiry circles him and the devout, self-sacrificing Sonya offers a path toward confession, Raskolnikov struggles between pride and the longing for redemption.
Dostoyevsky transforms a simple crime into a profound study of conscience, suffering, and the limits of reason. The novel probes the dangerous allure of ideologies that place certain people above moral law, and it insists that true deliverance comes only through humility, love, and acceptance of guilt. Its psychological depth and moral urgency make it one of literature's enduring masterpieces.
How it begins
Dostoevsky was the son of a doctor. His parents were very hard-working and deeply religious people, but so poor that they lived with their five children in only two rooms. The father and mother spent their evenings in reading aloud to their children, generally from books of a serious character. Though always sickly and delicate Dostoevsky came out third in the final examination of the Petersburg school of Engineering. There he had already begun his first work, “Poor Folk.” This story was published by the poet Nekrassov in his review and was received with acclamations. The shy, unknown youth found himself instantly something of a celebrity. A brilliant and successful career seemed to open before him, but those hopes were soon dashed. In 1849 he was arrested. Though neither by temperament nor conviction a revolutionist, Dostoevsky was one of a little group of young men who met together to read Fourier and Proudhon. He was accused of “taking part in conversations against the censorship, of reading a letter from Byelinsky to Gogol, and of knowing of the intention to set up a printing press.” Under Nicholas I. (that “stern and just man,” as Maurice Baring calls him) this was enough, and he was condemned to death. After eight months’ imprisonment he was with twenty-one others taken out to the Semyonovsky Square to be shot.
Text from Project Gutenberg, public domain.