Crime and Punishment

Crime and Punishment was written in 1865–66, in the worst year of Dostoevsky’s life, and published in twelve monthly instalments of The Russian Messenger through 1866. His brother Mikhail had died in 1864, leaving him responsible for the debts of their failed magazine; his first wife had died the same year; he had gambled away what money he had in Wiesbaden; and he had signed a contract with the publisher Stellovsky that obliged him to deliver another novel by November 1866 or forfeit the rights to everything he had written. He dictated The Gambler to a stenographer, Anna Snitkina, in twenty-six days that autumn, married her the following February, and finished Crime and Punishment between those two events. It made his name with the general public in a way his earlier work had not, and it has never been out of print in any language since.

The story is a murder and its consequences, told almost entirely from inside the murderer. Raskolnikov, a former student in St Petersburg, kills an old pawnbroker with an axe, and her sister, who walks in; the remaining five hundred pages are the slow pressure of a city, a detective, a family and a young woman on a mind that has persuaded itself of a theory. Dostoevsky had planned the book as a first-person confession and changed to the third person late in the writing; the result is a narrative that stays close enough to Raskolnikov to share his fevers and far enough to watch them. The interviews with Porfiry Petrovich, the investigating magistrate, are the ancestors of every cat-and-mouse interrogation in the literature of crime.

This edition presents Constance Garnett’s translation of 1914, the version through which most English readers came to Dostoevsky for the better part of a century. Garnett worked quickly and occasionally smoothed what she did not follow; later translators have been more exact about idiom and more willing to reproduce the roughness of the Russian. Her English is nonetheless clear, fast and durable, and its copyright has expired, which is why Bibliomancer can offer it complete and free. Her short translator’s preface on Dostoevsky’s life is included as she wrote it. The Russian text was first published in 1866; nothing has been abridged.