Crime and Punishment

A murderer torn between megalomania and remorse - Dostoevsky's great crime novel In the sweltering streets of St Petersburg, impoverished former student Rodion Raskolnikov convinces himself that one ruthless act can liberate him-and prove his theory that extraordinary people stand above the law. The murder he commits, however, opens a labyrinth of fear, fever, and moral reckoning. As the relentless investigator Porfiry closes in and the compassionate Sonia offers a different path, Raskolnikov is driven toward confession, punishment, and the hard-won possibility of redemption. Dostoyevsky's masterpiece is a psychological thriller and a profound inquiry into guilt, justice, and the price of pride. Taut, unsettling, and fiercely humane, it captures a city on the edge-and a mind at war with itself. A novel of poverty and power, reason and faith, it still reads with shocking immediacy.

Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky was born on November 11, 1821, in Moscow and died on February 9, 1881, in St. Petersburg. He came from an impoverished noble family; his father was a physician. After the death of his mother in 1837, Dostoevsky moved to St. Petersburg with his brother Mikhail, where he studied civil engineering at the Military Academy from 1838 to 1843. In 1844 he began work on his debut novel Poor Folk, published in 1846. This novel, together with The Double, which also appeared in 1846, brought him immediate and widespread acclaim. Among his major works are the novels Crime and Punishment (1866), The Idiot (1868), and The Brothers Karamazov (1880). Dostoevsky is a central representative of Realism within Russian literature and is considered, alongside Leo Nikolayevich Tolstoy, the greatest Russian writer.