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  • Published: 7 March 2006
  • ISBN: 9781101142318
  • Imprint: PEN US eBook Adult
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 560

Crime and Punishment




The acclaimed new translation of Dostoyevsky's masterpiece for Penguin Classics

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

  • Published: 7 March 2006
  • ISBN: 9781101142318
  • Imprint: PEN US eBook Adult
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 560

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.