Crime And Punishment: A Riveting Psychological Thriller Social Critique Russian Literature Psychological Exploration of Guilt and Redemption Gripping Tale of Crime, Conscience, and Punishment

Great book Nice print

This is another classic novel that I enjoyed very much. I would never have read in book form but it seemed do-able on the e-reader. I found the names of the characters muddling and think that if I had learned even elementary Russian I would understand something more about the names and places. The story is very detailed Dostoevskisy does not shrink at all from "telling it like it is", except he doesn't give any detail about people's sex lives. The psychology is quite apparent and is partly what makes the story so long. If you had been putting off reading some of the classics - give this one a go. It was a good £00.38p's worth, and would keep you going through several train journeys..........

First thing of note, the ‘leather’ material is a soft touch type feel with a slight texture to it. Also doesn’t leave scratch marks easily like some other soft type leathers. The foil seems planted and vibrant, especially against the red background. Paper isn’t exactly smooth, it has a grainy type of texture to it. Font is a large enough and nothing is misprinted, blotchy or uneven etc. I got this on sale for £14, so, can’t complain. Retail price is £25 and I can honestly say I would pay the retail price for this particular Wilco book. It’s a great alternative, or ‘match’ in theme with the Barnes and Noble leather bound series. Which retail for around £25-35. Though they are better quality in many areas over the Wilco, finding the Crime and Punishment version in Barnes and noble is almost impossible, or overpriced - this is a great alternative.

I started reading Crime and Punishment, which I had somehow missed during school reading, as a personal test to see if I can still enjoy the classics, or if the long winded descriptions would now, in the age of the internet, seem long and tiresome. What I found is an immensely captivating tale, written half in the air of philosophical and psychological musing, and half as retelling juicy gossip. Only Dostoyevsky could probably pull off the combination of the two so splendidly. It feels hard to put down and yet calls for pause on its own. It is worth the time to see through.

This book isn’t even Crime and Punishment - it’s The Brothers Karamazov with the wrong front cover!

Crime and Punishment is set in Russia in the 1800's. It is written from the perspective of the protagonist Raskolnikov; a young student. Despite its reputation as being hard going, I found it easy to read and impossible to put down. Due to financial hardship and circumstance Raskolnikov commits murder. Russia was economically and politically unstable at the time of writing and one of the greatest arguments in favor of socialism is that, if people were equal would crime be eliminated? Would the reason for acting criminally no longer exist? The novel spreads this message, without focusing politics as a major theme. Drawing upon the writings of Marx and Engels, Russia became Communist in 1917 under Lenin, succeeded by Stalin after Lenin's death in 1925. As the title suggests the crime - one man murdering another and; punishment - the guilt, paranoia, mental deterioration and then incarceration are the major themes, the content of the entire novel. Other plot-lines such as romance take a significant back seat. Love does indeed suffer as a consequence of the crime, part of the punishment I guess. A tale of love, justice, psychology and suffering; this is a wonderful read, and despite what Willy Mason says, you should read Dostoevsky at your age.

I bought C&P on kindle (this exact link) and a quarter of the way through I realise it's not Crime and Punishment at all, but The Brothers Karamazov! Only 15p so can't complain but so confused. Anyone else experienced this?

In my experience, all "great" fiction works on more than one level, and continues to compel readers' attention for many decades after it was written - something I certainly found true of Crime and Punishment. Other reviewers have said how gripping the story of Raskolnikov is. He is a psychopath of a type familiar from a thousand 20th and 21st century thrillers, in print and on screen. I could well believe that Hitchcock read this book and learned from it, because the build-up of tension is Hitchcockian. Nabakov was not a fan of Dostoevsky, thinking him a bit of a bore and an eccentric - and not a particularly accomplished writer. Humbly, I have to disagree. As well as being a brilliant psychological drama, it's a critique of Russian society and the intellectual climate in the 1860s, just a few years after the emancipation of the serfs, when ideas like nihilism were in the air. If Raskolnikov had 'lived' 60 years later, he might have found a focus for his life in Bolshevism. Although that, as we know, might have involved him in mass-murder, or even genocide as one of Stalin's henchmen, rather than the single murder he commits in Crime and Punishment.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky generally seemed to write books set in the quirky period of time sandwiched in between serfdom and the Communist Revolution in Russia somewhere in the late 19th century. It is a point in time which most people living today could not personally attest to or even have much knowledge about yet it seems oddly familiar in many ways to modern society. It is hierarchical with various classes having obvious advantages over the others yet it wasn't overly strict like a caste system from which one was cemented into a position in society and could not escape. It also had a strong bureaucracy which society seemed to value and hold in somewhat high regard due to an appreciation of the benefits it provides to a society in need of order and discipline while at the same time chafing at the ways in which it stifled creativity and personal freedom. Against that backdrop this book paints a portrait of a young man who commits a robbery and murder which he argues about for a fair portion of the book within his own mind as he lurches back and forth between despising himself and feeling justified in doing it "for the greater good." There is also a fair amount of characters in this book who push and pull the main character from various directions as he processes what he has done and how he really feels about it and someone much smarter than me has probably analyzed if these characters had any symbolic meaning or not, but they seem like an odd mix. The main character is a university student driven to crime by desperation mixed with intellectually inspired notions of class warfare. He meets a man at a tavern who is an alcoholic and befriends him early in the book only to later meet the mans daughter and develop a relationship with her. The woman is somewhat similar to the main character in that she is badly conflicted as well in that she professes to be a Christian yet makes a living as a prostitute due to her family being so desperately poor. She becomes a sort of moral voice for the main character. The main character's sister also appears in town and there is a whole subplot about how she is going to marry a wealthy man to help her family while at the same time being pursued/blackmailed by another man who is obsessed with her only to reject them both for an idealistic third man. There is also a detective who joins the cast at some point and suspects the main character of his crime even though he has little real evidence. He thereafter engages in a psychological game with the main character to break him into confessing. The story also has odd similarities to Doctor Zhivago and the Tell tale Heart. Edgar Allen Poe wrote the Tell tale Heart in the 1840's and FD didn't write this story until the 1860's while Doctor Zhivago was written sometime in the early 1950's but whether any are similar to another intentionally or due to mere coincidence is beyond my knowledge. I am just noting that because I kept thinking about it while I read it and so many of the characters reminded me of characters from there. In any event, the real theme of this book seems to be the conflict between faith and reason. The main character knows things he is doing (or has done) are wrong, but justifies many of them intellectually and politically only to feel conflicted about them. In the end though the book is really about a journey through the process of faith and reason while at the same time offering a commentary of what the author must have perceived as a rise in intellectual and political thoughts and actions at the expense of morality and truth. Perhaps he divined the coming Revolution or maybe the book is not that deep. I really am somewhat uncertain but I know that I enjoyed reading it and each time I read it I end up thinking more deeply about what the author means, what he was thinking and if he was trying to say something I am not yet grasping. All of these to me are good signs that a book is worthy of reading and enjoying.

I’m still a new to reading novels, so my opinion may change in the future, but I have say that for one of my first novels to read I feel like I’ve read a master piece! How the characters in the novel are written, makes them feel real and connectable to. The description of the characters, their personalities and the places where events happened is very likable as well. The way I can hear the characters’ thoughts made me sometime feel like I was the person living and thinking that way, as if I were them! onetime I even felt almost going crazy as one of the characters was going crazy! It is in the psychological genre and it does a great job at it, but I would advise to stay away from it if you’re not fond of that genre. As a last note, as a non English native speaker the novel was a little hard to read(I needed to use the translator a couple of times). TLDR; I felt like I read a master piece. It was enjoyable, makes you feel like you are the character him/her self, the way the characters and their thoughts are presented is fantastic and makes them connectable to and makes the reader able to understand them. I liked it a lot, I definitely recommend it to anyone into the psychological genre.

Great reading A classic

中学生の時に翻訳版を読んでいます。当時は主人公の「1つの罪は100の善行によって償われる」という考えに唸りました。主人公を応援する心情で読んだものでしたが、今再び読んでみて主人公の傲慢さ、というかただの精神病じゃないかと……。主人公には嫌悪を感じました。大体、綿密に計画し信念のもとに行っているはずなのに肝心のお金はとってこれず、思い切り体調まで崩して情緒すら不安定で。実行前の雄々しさはどこに？まあ主人公がめちゃくちゃな反面、ラズミーヒンの献身が目を引きヒーローとして見守れたのは良かったです。

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