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  • Published: 6 July 1993
  • ISBN: 9780099981909
  • Imprint: Vintage Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 592
  • RRP: $23.00

Crime and Punishment




The old woman was merely a sickness... it wasn't a human being I killed, it was a principle!

TRANSLATED BY RICHARD PEVEAR & LARISSA VOLOKHONSKY

'The old woman was merely a sickness . . .it wasn't a human being I killed, it was a principle!'

A troubled young man commits the perfect crime - the murder of a vile pawnbroker whom no one will miss. Raskolnikov is desperate for money, but convinces himself that his motive for the murder is to benefit mankind. So begins one of the greatest novels ever written, a journey into the criminal mind, a police thriller, and a philosophical meditation on morality and redemption.

  • Published: 6 July 1993
  • ISBN: 9780099981909
  • Imprint: Vintage Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 592
  • RRP: $23.00

Other books in the series

The New Penguin Book Of American Short Stories, From Washington Irving To Lydia Davis
A Dog's Heart
The Black Tulip
The Lady of the Camellias
Selected Poetry
On Sparta
Man and Superman
Saint Joan
Botchan
Kusamakura
Military Dispatches

About the authors

Fyodor Dostoevsky

Fyodor Mikailovich Dostoevsky’s life was as dark and dramatic as the great novels he wrote. He was born in Moscow in 1821. A short first novel, Poor Folk (1846), brought him instant success, but his writing career was cut short by his arrest for alleged subversion against Tsar Nicholas I in 1849. His prison experiences coupled with his conversion to a profoundly religious philosophy formed the basis for his great novels. But it was his fortuitous marriage to Anna Snitkina, following a period of utter destitution brought about by his compulsive gambling, that gave Dostoevsky the emotional stability to complete Crime and Punishment (1866), The Idiot (1868–1869), The Possessed (1871–1872), and The Brothers Karamazov (1879–1880). When Dostoevsky died in 1881, he left a legacy of masterworks that influenced the great thinkers and writers of the Western world and immortalized him as a giant among writers of world literature.

Praise for Crime and Punishment

Dostoevsky makes Martin Amis seem as if he was writing 130 years ago and that Dostoevsky is writing now. Read all of Dostoevsky. These books are for now and they matter, because it's up to us to call a halt to our TV producers, politicians, gutless artists, poets and writers: these "teenagers of all ages" who are propelling us towards a consumerist hell of disposability over quality

Billy Childish

Dostoevsky's finest masterpiece

John Bayley

Donne, Herbert, Shakespeare, Jane Austen, George Eliot, Dostoevsky, Henry James - these are the great psychologists - far greater than Freud or Klein or Jung

Sally Vickers

The best translation of Crime and Punishment currently available... An especially faithful re-creation...with a coiled-spring kinetic energy... Don't miss it

Washington Post

Crime and Punishment...is about a big subject - the meaning of life - yet it is gritty, gripping and it's depiction of city life gives it a modern, timeless feel

Leila Aboulela, author of The Translator

This fresh, new translation...provides a more exact, idiomatic, and contemporary rendition of the novel that brings Fyodor Dostoevsky's tale achingly alive... It succeeds beautifully

San Francisco Chronicle