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Crime and Punishment

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Crime and Punishment is by truth the best book ever written. It talks about Raskolnikov, a foreign student troubled by money woes who commits a heinous crime. Then he gets sick of himself and has all of that guilt in his heart and can't let go of it.--Submitted by Laura

This book was written by Fyodor Dostoevsky to help outline the life of a young man struggling with insanity. It is powerful and moving as he takes you into the psyche and behaviour of one of the most deranged characters of any fictional tale.--Submitted by Matthew Stankowicz

Does madness turn a man into a criminal? or does crime turn a criminal mad?--Submitted by Craig Fleming

This is an indisputable classic, with insight into the lives of poverty stricken Russians during the late 19th century. Although on the surface it appears to be a nothing more than a stretched out story line, the depth of psychological premises and the existentialist nature of the novel create a picture of true suffering and enable the reader to question the basic moralities of both historical and modern cultures. With continuing fatalities and guilt stricken chapters, Crime and Punishment brings forth an autobiographical aspect of Fyodor Dostoevsky and allows for the reader to gain insight and learn to question the systems of society.--Submitted by morgs

This novel is a psychological account of a man steeped in poverty. The biggest question is--is it the poverty that leads him to kill? Or is he just a man who believes that one can choose to be like Napoleon?; to take what they want and not feel remorse? This 19th Century classic asks fundamental questions about humanity, and gets you about as close to the answers as you may get.--Submitted by Kate O'Reilly

Crime and Punishment is a psychological study of a man who explored the limits of crime. Dostoevsky shows what really happens when a man commits a crime. Theorizing and justifying crime and intentions does not satisfy the human soul. The soul has its own way of working and Dostoevsky shows that starkly, with utter honesty. It is a profound study and at the end you realize, learn deeply about the human soul of what morality psychologically means, what crime means at the root. It is an action story and a psychological story integrated and it is a thriller and deeply intellectual at the same time. Read it. It is a book you can't but read with total attention. It is about the human soul and it concerns us all. Dostoevsky is a master story teller.--Submitted by Narendra Vellanki

St. Petersburg, 1866. An ex-student, currently out of a job and living in a sickly-yellow coloured penthouse in total squalor, is having issues with an old pawnbroker down the street. He suddenly decides to play God and pass ultimate judgement of right and wrong, and having determined the pawnbroker's lifetime worth of guilt, he hunts her down. Thus begins the story of Rodion Raskolnikov, his friends, and his enemies as he faces the aftermath of his decisions and undergoes an epic transformation.--Submitted by MPL

Crime And Punishment is the story of a poverty stricken young man who dreams that by killing an old woman and stealing her wealth he can save himself and many other poor souls from utter poverty. But in the aftermath of the actual murder, the story takes an unexpected twist. He doesn't get anything valuable from the old woman to become rich. He becomes psychic. The very thought of the crime shatters his personality. He very cleverly tries to evade the law. But at the end he is caught hold of by the police officer. The depiction of the protagonist's inner struggle is excellent. His sympathy towards the poor and the suffering, his ardent love for Sonia, his affinity towards his mother and sister, and his sense of remorse are all very well depicted. The most intimate conversation between Raskonikov and Sonia is the most attractive part of the novel. Thus the novel reminds us that "for every crime , there awaits you a punishment". Hats off to the great soul ---Dostoesky. --Submitted by M.R. Varghese, Kerala

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Translator's Preface
TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE A few words about Dostoevsky himself may help the English reader to understand his work. 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. Writing to his brother Mihail, Dostoevsky says: "They snapped words over our heads, and they made us put on the white shirts worn by persons condemned to death. Thereupon we were bound in threes to stakes, to suffer execution. Being the third in the row, I concluded I had only a few minutes of life before me. I thought of you and your dear ones and I contrived to kiss Plestcheiev and Dourov, who were next to me, and to bid them farewell. Suddenly the troops beat a tattoo, we were unbound, brought back upon the scaffold, and informed that his Majesty had spared us our lives." The sentence was commuted to hard labour. One of the prisoners, Grigoryev, went mad as soon as he was untied, and never regained his sanity. The intense suffering of this experience left a lasting stamp on Dostoevsky's mind. Though his religious temper led him in the end to accept every suffering with resignation and to regard it as a blessing in his own case, he constantly recurs to the subject in his writings. He describes the awful agony of the condemned man and insists on the cruelty of inflicting such torture. Then followed four years of penal servitude, spent in the company of common criminals in Siberia, where he began the "Dead House," and some years of service in a disciplinary battalion. He had shown signs of some obscure nervous disease before his arrest and this now developed into violent attacks of epilepsy, from which he suffered for the rest of his life. The fits occurred three or four times a year and were more frequent in periods of great strain. In 1859 he was allowed to return to Russia. He started a journal-- "Vremya," which was forbidden by the Censorship through a misunderstanding. In 1864 he lost his first wife and his brother Mihail. He was in terrible poverty, yet he took upon himself the payment of his brother's debts. He started another journal--"The Epoch," which within a few months was also prohibited. He was weighed down by debt, his brother's family was dependent on him, he was forced to write at heart-breaking speed, and is said never to have corrected his work. The later years of his life were much softened by the tenderness and devotion of his second wife. In June 1880 he made his famous speech at the unveiling of the monument to Pushkin in Moscow and he was received with extraordinary demonstrations of love and honour. A few months later Dostoevsky died. He was followed to the grave by a vast multitude of mourners, who "gave the hapless man the funeral of a king." He is still probably the most widely read writer in Russia. In the words of a Russian critic, who seeks to explain the feeling inspired by Dostoevsky: "He was one of ourselves, a man of our blood and our bone, but one who has suffered and has seen so much more deeply than we have his insight impresses us as wisdom . . . that wisdom of the heart which we seek that we may learn from it how to live. All his other gifts came to him from nature, this he won for himself and through it he became great."

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