Author: Dostoevsky, Fyodor

Classic fiction (pre c 1945)

Published on 4 July 2022 by Alma Books Ltd (Alma Classics) in the United Kingdom as part of ‘the Alma Classics Evergreens’ series.

Paperback | 576 pages
128 x 197 x 39 | 432g

Poverty-stricken

and cut off from society, former law student Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikov

leads a desolate life in a dreary little room in St Petersburg. Having

abandoned all hopes of sustaining himself through work, he now obsesses over

the idea of changing his fortunes through an act of extreme violence: the

killing of an elderly pawnbroker. His mind baulks at the horror of his plan,

but when he hears that his sister Dunya is about to agree to a loveless

marriage in order to escape the advances of her employer, his disgust for the

world becomes unbounded, and his feelings of rebellion and revenge push him

closer and closer to the edge of the precipice.

A masterpiece of psychological insight, Dostoevsky’s 1866 novel features

some of its author’s most memorable characters from the temperamental

protagonist Raskolnikov to the amoral sensualist Svidrigailov and the immoral

lawyer Luzhin. Presented here in a sparkling new translation by Roger

Cockerell, Crime and Punishment is a towering work in nineteenth-century

Russian fiction and a landmark of world literature.