Crime and Punishment

Nominated as one of America’s best-loved novels by PBS’s The Great American Read

This acclaimed new translation of Dostoyevsky’s “psychological record of a crime” gives his dark masterpiece of murder and pursuit a renewed vitality, expressing its jagged, staccato urgency and fevered atmosphere as never before. Raskolnikov, a destitute and desperate former student, wanders alone through the slums of St. Petersburg, deliriously imagining himself above society’s laws. But when he commits a random murder, only suffering ensues. Embarking on a dangerous game of cat and mouse with a suspicious police investigator, Raskolnikov finds the noose of his own guilt tightening around his neck. Only Sonya, a downtrodden prostitute, can offer the chance of redemption.

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About the Contributors

Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821–1881) was a Russian novelist, journalist, and short-story writer whose novels Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov rank among the greatest of the nineteenth century.

Oliver Ready (translator) is a lecturer and research fellow in Russian literature and culture at the University of Oxford. He won the Rossica Translation Prize for his translation of The Prussian Bride by Yuri Buida and the Read Russia Prize for his translation of Before and During by Vladimir Sharov, and he was named Inttranet’s 2015 Linguist of the Year for his translation of Crime and Punishment. He is consultant editor at The Times Literary Supplement for Russia and East-Central Europe.

Zohar Lazar (cover illustrator) is a frequent contributor of illustrations to The New Yorker, Rolling Stone, Esquire, GQ, and The New York Times Magazine.