Staff Pick
This is one of the finest explorations of criminal psychology ever written. With enormous scope, Dostoyevsky dissects poverty, rationalization, the criminal mind, guilt, confession, religion, and redemption. He also provides an exquisite look at overwhelming paranoia. Crime and Punishment is a perfect, breathtaking masterpiece. Recommended By Dianah H., Powells.com
Synopses & Reviews
One of the world’s greatest novels,
Crime and Punishment is the story of a murder and its consequences—an unparalleled tale of suspense set in the midst of nineteenth-century Russia’s troubled transition to the modern age.
In the slums of czarist St. Petersburg lives young Raskolnikov, a sensitive, intellectual student. The poverty he has always known drives him to believe that he is exempt from moral law. But when he puts this belief to the test and commits murder, there results unbearable suffering. Crime and punishment, the novel reminds us, “grow from the same seed.”
“No other novelist,” wrote Irving Howe of Dostoyevsky, “has dramatized so powerfully the values and dangers, the uses and corruptions of systematized thought.” But Sigmund Freud and others saw the Russian’s work in a different light. Said Freud, “He might have been a liberator of mankind. Instead he chose to be its jailer.”
“He is the only psychologist I have anything to learn from.”—Friedrich Nietzsche
Synopsis
Mistrustfully and with an affectation of being alarmed and almost affronted, he scanned Raskolnikov's low and narrow "cabin." With the same amazement he stared at Raskolnikov, who lay undressed, dishevelled, unwashed, on his miserable dirty sofa, looking fixedly at him.
Synopsis
Dostoyevsky s epic masterpiece, unabridged, with an afterword by Robin Feuer Miller
One of the world s greatest novels, Crime and Punishment is the story of a murder and its consequences an unparalleled tale of suspense set in the midst of nineteenth-century Russia s troubled transition to the modern age.
In the slums of czarist St. Petersburg lives young Raskolnikov, a sensitive, intellectual student. The poverty he has always known drives him to believe that he is exempt from moral law. But when he puts this belief to the test, he suffers unbearably. Crime and punishment, the novel reminds us, grow from the same seed.
No other novelist, wrote Irving Howe of Dostoyevsky, has dramatized so powerfully the values and dangers, the uses and corruptions of systematized thought. And Friedrich Nietzsche called him the only psychologist I have anything to learn from.
With an Introduction by Leonard J. Stanton and James D. Hardy Jr.
and an Afterword by Robin Feuer Miller
"
Synopsis
The poverty-stricken Raskolnikov, believing he is exempt from moral law, murders a man only to face the consequences not only from society but from his conscience, in this seminal story of justice, morality, and redemption from one of Russia's greatest novelists.
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