Crime and Punishment

About this book

Determined to overreach his humanity and assert his untrammeled individual will, Raskolnikov, and impoverished student living in the St. Petersburg of the Tsars, commits an act of murder and theft and sets into motion a story which, for its excruciating suspense, its atmospheric vividness, and its profundity of characterization and vision, is almost unequaled in the literatures of the world.Fyodor Mikhaylovich Dostoyevsky was a Russian writer, essayist and philosopher, perhaps most recognized today for his novels Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov. Dostoyevsky is considered one of Europe's major novelists. His literary output explores human psychology in the troubled political, social and spiritual context of 19th-century Russian society. Considered by many as a founder, or precursor of 20th-century existentialism, his Notes from Underground, written in the embittered voice of the anonymous "underground man", was called by Walter Kaufmann the "best overture for existentialism ever written."In 1844, after serving five years in the army, Dostoyevsky started to write his own fiction and in 1845 his first work, the epistolary short novel, Poor Folk, was met with great acc…