CRIME AND PUNISHMENT

 

REVIEW

Is it possible to commit the perfect crime? Is there such a thing as “justified murder,” which costs one person's life but helps many others? Can the human conscience be silenced by rational reflections? These are the questions that Fedor M. Dostoevsky seeks to answer in his novel Crime and Punishment. The Russian author's best-known and best-loved work presents a masterfully constructed detective story: the murder of an old moneylender at the hands of the student Raskolnikov and the remorse of conscience that overwhelms him afterwards. Raskolnikov believes he is a kind of superman, compares himself to Napoleon and seeks to justify his actions with rational arguments. 

But, after committing the murder, his bad conscience drags him little by little towards an overwhelming despair. Sonia, the virtuous prostitute, will finally convince him to confess his guilt and start a new life. Respecting the rules of Russian realism, Dostoevsky describes the social misery of the streets of St. Petersburg. With a simple and gripping language, he wrote the best detective novel of all times, according to the writer Thomas Mann, and, at the same time, he presents an interesting psychological study that illuminates the darkest sides of a murderer's mind.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Born on November 11, 1821 in Moscow, Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky has been and is a literary figure admired by many. Among his most loyal readers are personalities as diverse as Albert Einstein and Virginia Woolf. The famous scientist highlighted the human and psychological transcendence of the writer's work, assuring that “Dostoevsky gives me more than any scientist”, and the English writer confessed that “apart from Shakespeare, there is no more exciting reading than Dostoevsky”.

Considered, thus, as one of the greatest authors of universal literature, the life of the great Russian narrator was plagued by tragic events that would deeply mark his work.