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ReadingRate edition

Crime and Punishment

Fyodor Dostoevsky, 1866

822 pages · 220,957 words · about 15 hours · regard 94 of 100

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Rodion Raskolnikov, a destitute student in sweltering St. Petersburg, murders a pawnbroker with an axe. He has a theory: extraordinary men stand above ordinary morality, and he wants to know which kind he is. The murder takes thirty pages. The next five hundred belong to his unraveling. Dostoevsky follows Raskolnikov through feverish streets, cramped rooms, and conversations he cannot control — with the shrewd detective Porfiry, who circles without accusing, and with Sonya, a prostitute who reads him the story of Lazarus. The city itself presses in: the heat, the stench, the drunks and destitutes spilling out of taverns. Raskolnikov's mother writes him a letter full of love and sacrifices he cannot bear to accept. This is a novel about guilt as a physiological fact. Raskolnikov doesn't suffer from abstract remorse — he sweats, hallucinates, falls unconscious, and cannot stop returning to the scene. The philosophical scaffolding (who deserves to live? what does a superior man owe society?) keeps collapsing under the weight of what actually happened. Few novels put an idea and its consequences in such direct, unsparing contact.

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