Crime and Punishment
Fyodor Dostoevsky, 1866
A broke student in St. Petersburg tests a theory that some people are above the law, and discovers the cost is not legal but psychological.
Fyodor Dostoevsky
1821–1881
Dostoevsky's Petersburg is a city of cramped rooms, loud arguments and people thinking themselves into corners. The four books here share that pressure: someone works out an idea about how to live, then has to live with it. Start with «Crime and Punishment» if you want a story that grips from the first pages, or «Notes from Underground» if you'd rather have a short, furious voice arguing directly at you.
Feels like unease, faith and dread.
Start with Crime and Punishment.
Dostoevsky was sentenced to death in 1849, reprieved at the last moment, and sent to a Siberian prison camp; he wrote Crime and Punishment in serial installments while dodging creditors.
What if the punishment you wanted most was remorse, and it never came.
And if only fate would have sent him repentance—burning repentance that would have torn his heart and robbed him of sleep, that repentance, the awful agony of which brings visions of hanging or drowning! Oh, he would have been glad of it! Tears and agonies would at least have been life. But he did not repent of his crime. Books by Fyodor Dostoevsky
The Brothers Karamazov
Fyodor Dostoevsky, 1880
A father is murdered and his sons—sensual, intellectual, spiritual—argue over guilt, God, and whether anyone can love another person.
The Idiot
Fyodor Dostoevsky, 1868
A Christlike innocent lands in a Petersburg of money, vanity and feverish talk, and every room he enters begins to tilt.
Notes from Underground
Fyodor Dostoevsky, 1864
A furious, funny, self-lacerating monologue from a Petersburg clerk who argues that freedom begins where reason and self-interest end.
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