What can I add to 7000+ reviews (at the time I write)? I think this book is fascinating because of all the topic it covers. Like the OJ trial, it is about many important interconnected things and those things remain important today, even though this book was originally published in 1865.

Sure, it has a lot about crime and punishment. But also insanity and temporary insanity, the latter a legal plea that could be entered in Russia of the mid-1800's. It's about guilt and conscience, long before Freud. In fact, this book was written at a time when psychological theories were coming into vogue. It's about false confessions. It's about poverty and social class and people who rise above their class and people who fall from the class they were born into. It's about the wild dreams and the follies of youth.

There is also mention of many social theories that were in vogue at that time, so, for example, if you want to, you can click on Wikipedia to find out about "Fourier's system" and his phalansteres. There is attempted rape, blackmail, child labor, child prostitution, child marriage and child molestation. There is discussion of marrying for money. There are ethnic tensions between Russians and the Germans of St. Petersburg. Should you give to charity or should you give to change the conditions that caused the poverty? Like me, you may have thought that was a modern idea, but here it is, laid out in 1865. There's a lot about alcoholism. Stir in a cat-and-mouse detective and a bit of Christian redemption. No wonder this is a classic.

I have few Dostoevsky fans in my friends list so my opinions here might not go over so well. I have been wanting to read this classic for a while and I had high expectations, but they were not met. I liked it okay but I found it to be a bit slow and drawn out. Ultimately not a whole lot happens in the story, but it takes 500 pages to get there. In fact, there are probably as many plot points in the 15 page epilogue as in the rest of the book.

However, despite this, I can say that parts of the journey were pretty good. Every few chapters there would be a high intensity event that would draw me in. In fact, if you graphed this book out with the high points followed by long lulls, it would probably look like an EKG.



Also, it was interesting to take in the classic Russian writing. Whether or not it was always super exciting, I did enjoy the feel of the narrative from the classic Russian perspective.

In summary, I would not recommend this as highly as some other classics, but if you are hardcore into completing your classic reading list, you can't miss this one.

This took so long because it was too big to travel with and also made me anxious to read. Does anyone recommend a particular translation? I read Pevear and Volokhonsky and I’m guessing I’d prefer something else. Might try again in ten years.

Schuld und Sühne"
The book is excellent literature of the highest level and can still be read easily and easily. As usual with Dostoyevsky, the characters are shaken by great emotions, nobody stays calm. The account of the murder of the pawnbroker and her sister, as well as the interrogation of the shrewd policeman is among the highlights. The story takes surprising turns again and again. The descriptions Dostoevsky everything is simply incomparable. You are in the middle of history and everywhere. Guilt and atonement is a very readable classic that lets you look deeply into the human abysses.
This book guilt and atonement is a psychological, philosophical, religious, and at the same time social.

"I like living. I have sometimes been wildly, despairingly, acutely miserable, racked with sorrow, but through it all I still know quite certainly that just to be alive is a grand thing."

- Agatha Christie

Crime and Punishment proved to be one of those rare breed of books that well and truly break through the outer facade and leave behind a permanent impression, even if its a dark and hideous one.

Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky died a 110 years ago before I was born, and yet all through the while that I was reading Crime and Punishment, it felt like he must have written this books for me and me alone. It was almost as if he could see through time you know; like a known face reaching out from an unknown, distant pass. I found Raskolnikov's actions and world view to be eerily similar to that of mine, as if I was looking through his eyes. Or if he was looking through mine eyes instead; one and the same. Now mind you, this is not necessarily how the world is, only this is how he chose to see it. Or perhaps this was the only way he was capable of seeing it. Note the difference between the two, for Dostoyevksy not once accuses Raskolnikov of a crime. He lets us, the readers, decide for ourselves about that. That, however, is right about the only slack he cuts him.

Everywhere else he scythes through his 'protagonist'. Lays bare his twisted and conceited thoughts, practically strips him naked. And that is where I found myself cringing. Raskolnikov's biggest flaws, his worst nightmares, his darkest secrets were all mine. But this wasn't it. Every time I looked up from these accursed pages, I could almost imagine Dostoyevsky sitting off across me. With a smirk on his face he would say, "You really thought no one would ever know?"

Add to this the fact that beyond a point in this book, Nina Simone's beautiful rendition of Sinnerman would not stop playing in my head. You know you're in love with a book when mere words on a scrap of page (although Dostoyevsky's are hardly 'mere words' to be honest) can spring in your head one of your favorite tunes. English is not the most evocative language in the world; am afraid that honour must go to Urdu. Yet, the force behind these 'mere words' is one to reckon with, and I learnt it the most beautiful way.

And to top it all, Sonya. I am a sucker for simplicity and her character was delightfully attractive and fascinating. As is, I found her and Raskolnikov's a better story than most that I see around myself, real or imaginary world whichever. Should I feel too stupid to wish happiness for them? I think not, because its not too bad to have a little bit of hope at times. And that is what I realized Dostoyevsky was trying to tell us too - that there is hope and redemption for the worst of us.


Raskolnikov and Sonya

So yes, living is worth the while. So said Madam Christie..so said Raskolnikov too, and Dostoyevsky. So say I.

I first read Crime and Punishment when I was about sixteen. It made a profound impression on me, firstly it put me off reading science-fiction and fantasy for a good decade (which had been my standard fare during the teenage years - because in this book I found one extreme of what writing can do - it can stop you dead in the street, and possesses your imagination, secondly it was a book which described a world of poverty and abuse that seemed familiar to me - my father worked in child protection when I was young and stories of those children formed part of my upbringing invoked in much the same manner as the hungry Belgians who crowd unseen round the plates of children who won't eat their dinner. The claustrophobic mental state of Raskolnikov overwhelmed me from time to time, and once left me marooned on a traffic island watching the mad flow of vehicles until I could pick a safer crossing over a space that wasn't Sennaya Ploshchad'.

This is another shock novel of the Victorian city. Poverty, alcoholism, reformed families that make the Brady Bunch look like a reasonable experiment in living, desperation that you can smell, sexual predation, clashing ideas, murder.

It is a crime story told from the point of view of the criminal that demonstrates the range and capabilities of the genre. An dthis the story of murder and detection makes this the most approachable of Dostoevsky's later novels. We live in the criminal's mind. See his guilt, feel the whys and the dead end of the crime, we are pursued, knowing the only escape is to surrender. This is also the story of a man's relationship to society and the thrust of the story, sharper than a borrowed axe, is psychological.

Here is a rich picture of St. Petersburg society from the bottom up. The struggle for a decent life, the arid reality and the hero's daydreams of Haussmann's redesign of Paris as if the answer to grinding, crushing workings of society is to sweep everybody up and lay down boulevards and Crystal Palaces instead. Yet the environment does shape the novel, in the open spaces of Siberia, as Dostoevsky was, one can be reborn, while in the city it gets so claustrophobic that like Raskolnikov one can be pushed back into one's own skull.

However, typically of Dostoevsky's post Siberian writing the vital question answered by the novel is man's relationship with God. This is a deeply Christian novel. From the inversion of the values of the Divine Realm in the earthly one so that Sophia the Divine Wisdom I think this is a concept more typical of the Orthodox churches than of Catholicism or the Protestant Churches, there is also an element of the Holy Fool about Sonia who becomes a social outcast for the salvation of others becomes Sonia the prostitute, to the confrontation in dialogue between the representative of the Emperor and the martyr confessing their faith typical of the Passion narratives The introduction of Visions of Glory gives an overview of this kind of writing.

The relationship between the hero and God is expressed through his name: Raskolnikov Other characters have significant names too: Razumikhin - Mr Reasonable, Marmeladov - Mr Marmalade not that he is spreadable rather simply tragic-comic. These kind of names might be due to the influence of Dickens. Dostoevsky apparently had read several of Dickens' early novels though in French translations. . The Raskolniki in Russia were the Old Believers, a group who had split themselves off from mainstream Russian society over issues of religious practice in the seventeenth century. Raskolnikov is a splitter, a schismatic. The cause of Raskolnikov's split and alienation from society is ideological. Unlike his namesakes - the Old Believers who looked inwards to traditional Russian Culture - our hero obsesses over Napoleon III as a role model  rarely a good sign  and reformer of the urban landscape , something particularly striking in a novel set in St. Petersburg which was in any case looked far more like a western European city than most Russian conurbations, and the Crystal Palace (see also Notes from the Underground for more of this.) These are fantasies about human perfectibility that ignore God and so in Dostoevsky's view split him off, isolate him from communion with the rest of humanity.

Wisdom rules that the only answer is a public confession in Sennaya Ploshchad', the bustling St. Petersburg Haymarket. When I crossed Sennaya Ploshchad' in a winter in the early 90s it was easy to imagine the scene. The women one of my abiding memories of that place and time was that St. Petersburg was a place where the women worked. For those of us who constitute the minority of the world's human population there was alcohol instead. However this seemed to work out in a broadly acceptable way since the women loved the men and the men fancied themselves too. This was epitomised on the day that I saw the son who in the army had learnt how to make Pelmeni sitting up on the only stool in the kitchen directing in Stakhanovite fashion the labour of his elderly mother, harassed looking wife and too sweet natured daughter as they knelt on their knees rolling out the dough for what looked to be several thousand Pelmeni. I alone was bemused by this. I don't think this has any bearing on the novel Crime and Punishment whatsoever selling flowers imported by the Invisible Hand via Holland, kept in perspex fronted boxes and warmed by a candle, would have looked on bemused as a modern Raskolnikov knelt on the loose cardboard and newspapers that dirtied the ice and snow of the square. In earthly terms it makes no sense, it is a crazy gesture, but it is one of Mikhail Bakhtin's carnival moments - so in divine terms it is supremely logical. The acceptance of punishment is the beginning of the imitation of Christ.

This review points out the nomads in the background to the final scene. This it seems to me as another reminder that this is a religious story working in the framework of divine history in which certain patterns repeat themselves until the Apocalypse and the end of time. Crime and Punishment is a repetition of the story of Cain and Abel. The pastoralists free life in uninterrupted covenant with nature contrasts to that of Raskolnikov, a settled Cain, who was doomed to murder his fellow man.

(Book 867 from 1001 Books) - Преступление и наказание = Prestupleniye i nakazaniye = Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Dostoevsky

Crime and Punishment is a novel by the Russian author Fyodor Dostoevsky.

It was first published in the literary journal The Russian Messenger in twelve monthly installments during 1866.

It is the second of Dostoevsky's full-length novels following his return from 5 years of exile in Siberia.

Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikov, a former law student, lives in extreme poverty in a tiny, rented room in Saint Petersburg.

Isolated and antisocial, he has abandoned all attempts to support himself, and is brooding obsessively on a scheme he has devised to murder and rob an elderly pawn-broker. On the pretext of pawning a watch, he visits her apartment, but remains unable to commit himself.

Later in a tavern he makes the acquaintance of Semyon Zakharovich Marmeladov, a drunkard who recently squandered his family's little wealth. Marmeladov tells him about his teenage daughter, Sonya, who has chosen to become a prostitute in order to support the family.

The next day Raskolnikov receives a letter from his mother in which she describes the problems of his sister Dunya, who has been working as a governess, with her ill-intentioned employer, Svidrigailov.

To escape her vulnerable position, and with hopes of helping her brother, Dunya has chosen to marry a wealthy suitor, Luzhin, whom they are coming to meet in Petersburg. Details in the letter suggest that Luzhin is a conceited opportunist who is seeking to take advantage of Dunya's situation.

Raskolnikov is enraged at his sister's sacrifice, feeling it is the same as what Sonya felt compelled to do. Painfully aware of his own poverty and impotence, his thoughts return to his idea. A further series of internal and external events seem to conspire to compel him toward the resolution to enact it. ...

عنوانها: «جنایت و کیفر (مترجم: محمدرضا عسکری در 147 ص)»؛ «جنایت و مکافات»؛ نویسنده: فئودور داستایوسکی؛ تاریخ نخستین خوانش: در ماه می سال 1970میلادی

عنوان: جنایت و مکافات؛ نویسنده: فئودور داستایوسکی؛ مترجم: مهری آهی، تهران، صفیعلیشاه، 1345؛ در 790ص؛ چاپ دیگر تهران، خوارزمی، سال1363؛ موضوع داستانهای نویسندگان روسیه - سده 19م

کهنترین ترجمه را جناب: «اسحق لاله زاری و انتشارات صفیعلیشاه از این کتاب نشر داده اند، در 396ص»، سپس بانو: «مهری آهی، در790صفحه، انتشارات خوارزمی»، جناب «بهروز بهزاد هم در 626ص انتشارات دنیای کتاب»؛ جناب «اصغر رستگار نیز در دو جلد در اصفهان، نشر فردا»؛ جناب «عنایت الله شکیباپور در 626ص»؛ جناب «پرویز شهدی کتاب پارسه در 659ص»؛ جناب «احمد علیقلیان در730ص نشر مرکز»، بانو «لویا روایی نیا، نگارستان کتاب در 976ص»؛ بانو «هانیه چوپانی، در 800ص، نشر فراروی»؛ بانو «مریم امیر و بانو آرزو پیراسته در 811ص، یاقوت کویر»؛ جناب «علی صحرایی در 775ص؛ نشر مهتاب»؛ جناب «اصغر رستگار در 711ص نشر نگاه»؛ نسخه خلاصه شده: با ترجمه جناب: «امیر اسماعیلی؛ تهران، توس، 1364؛ در 214ص»؛ و ....؛

داستان دانشجویی به نام: «راسکولْنیکُف» است، که با رعایت اصول، مرتکب کشتار می‌شود؛ با انگیزه‌ های پیچیده‌ ای، که حتی خود «راسکولنیکف» از تحلیل آنها عاجز است؛ او زن رباخواری را، همراه با خواهرش (که نامنتظره به هنگام رویدادن قتل در صحنه حاضر شده) می‌کشد، و پس از قتل، خود را ناتوان از خرج پولها، و جواهراتی که برداشته، می‌بیند؛ و آنها را پنهان می‌کند؛ پس از چند روز بیماری، و بستری شدن در خانه، «راسکولنیکف» این تصور را، که هر کس را که می‌بیند، انگار به او مظنون است؛ و با این افکار، کارش به جنون می‌کشد؛ در این بین او عاشق «سونیا» است، دختری که به خاطر مشکلات مالی خانواده‌ اش، دست به تن‌ فروشی زده است؛ مضمون و درون‌مایه ی رمان، تحلیلِ انگیزه‌ های قتل، و تأثیر قتل بر قاتل است؛ که «داستایوسکی» مسئلهٔ رابطه ی میان خویشتن، و جهان پیرامون، و فرد و جامعه، را در آن گنجانده اند؛ ...؛ خوانش نخستین بار این کتاب مدهوشم کرد

تاریخ بهنگام رسانی 02/06/1399هجری خورشیدی؛ 10/05/1400هجری خورشیدی؛ ا. شربیانی

“Pain and suffering are always inevitable for a large intelligence and a deep heart. The really great men must, I think, have great sadness on earth.”

I don’t even know where to begin with this one. I mean, what can I possibly say about “Crime and Punishment” that hasn’t been said already? I picked up my first Dostoyevsky novel right after finishing Yukio Mishima’s novel, “The Temple of the Golden Pavilion” (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...), because of the parallels between the two stories: they are both about young, isolated and rather nihilistic men, and while one book ends with a crime and the other more or less begins with one, both works pick apart the hearts and minds of someone capable of committing such acts, and what brings them to it.

Razkolnikov is a strange case: for most of the book, I did not know what to make of this man. Caught up in a bad financial situation, depressive, entitled, arrogant and utterly careless, there isn’t much to like in him. Especially since, as the story unfolds, you see that he is not nearly as intelligent as he believes himself to be. In fact, it becomes clearer and clearer that the person he thinks he is, and the person he actually is a very different, and as his self-image and rather muddled philosophical ideas start to crumble, he begins to seek forgiveness and redemption.

After coming up with a half-baked philosophical notion on what distinguishes extraordinary people from ordinary people, Razkolnikov convinced himself that he can prove his absurd theory to be right by committing a senseless murder. He chooses his victim on the basis that she is an inconsequential moneylender, and that in fact, the world might just be a better place without her anyway, as she brings her customers much misery. Of course, things don’t really work like that, and the consequences of his gesture will plague him in more ways than he could have imagined. Razkolnikov starts out as a bit of a slacker: he doesn’t have a kopek to his name, but won’t take work when it is offered to him, instead of trying to get his life together, he lets things fall to pieces around him and then whines endlessly about his condition. Then he is forced (by his own hand) to wrestle with his conscience. It is truly remarkable how a few days bring him from one extreme of behavior to a completely different way of living and looking at his life.

The description of the squalor of the poor neighborhoods of St-Petersburg, the misery and threadbare-ness people are reduced to, are vivid, almost Dickensian. And similarly, Dostoyevsky drives the point that people who live in such conditions will never be as important in the eyes of the law, as their more privileged counterparts. While this comes off as a bit heavy-handed and obvious at times, but thankfully, he also doesn't linger too long in lecture-mode.

The treatment of female characters struck me as more nuanced than I was expecting: Dostoyevsky’s women are drawn realistically, with their flaws made painfully obvious, but their strengths and wills are to be reckoned with. Sonya and Dunya are incredible! The way Dunya gets rid of her horrid suitor and would-be rapist by standing up for herself and her family, and Sonya’s immense power of forgiveness and compassion had me enthralled. Sonya’s faith sometimes comes across as naïve, but at the same time, how naïve can a girl in her position possibly be?

I read the Oliver Ready translation, which was clear and fluid, and made going through 700 pages much easier than I had anticipated. But I have to say that I found the first half of the book somewhat uneven. We go from moments of intense drama, to quiet introspection, to long ramblings that could have been trimmed generously without sacrificing any meaning... But once I got past the halfway point, things really ramped up, and it was difficult to put the book away for too long. The second half is really where the book earns its reputation as an existential thriller. Some scenes, while drawn out a bit, still kept me on the edge of my seat, hanging on to every word on the page, impressed by the intensity Dostoyevsky conveyed through something as simple as the reading of a few Bible verses... There is also a surprising streak of dark humour coursing through this novel, an absurdist humour that makes one snort rather than enjoy a good belly laugh – but I’m starting to think that’s just a Russian thing.

Reading “Crime and Punishment” actually makes me look forward to getting around to “The Brothers Karamazov”, as I have found Dostoyevsky to be just as thought-provoking and entertaining as his reputation promised. A great, if somewhat imperfect book, well worth making time for.