Crime and Punishment [ a ] is a novel by the Russian author Fyodor Dostoevsky. It was first published in the literary journal The Russian Messenger in twelve monthly installments during It is the second of Dostoevsky's full-length novels following his return from ten years of exile in Siberia.
Crime and Punishment is considered the first great novel of his mature period of writing [ 2 ] and is often cited as one of the greatest works of world literature. Crime and Punishment follows the mental anguish and moral dilemmas of Rodion Raskolnikov , an impoverished ex-student in Saint Petersburg who plans to kill an unscrupulous pawnbroker, an old woman who stores money and valuable objects in her flat.
He theorises that with the money he could liberate himself from poverty and go on to perform great deeds, and seeks to convince himself that certain crimes are justifiable if they are committed in order to remove obstacles to the higher goals of "extraordinary" men.
Once the deed is done, however, he finds himself wracked with confusion, paranoia, and disgust. His theoretical justifications lose all their power as he struggles with guilt and horror and is confronted with both internal and external consequences of his deed. At the time Dostoevsky owed large sums of money to creditors and was trying to help the family of his brother Mikhail, who had died in early After appeals elsewhere failed, Dostoevsky turned as a last resort to the publisher Mikhail Katkov and sought an advance on a proposed contribution.
Dostoevsky, having been engaged in polemical debates with Katkov in the early s, had never published anything in its pages before. In a letter to Katkov written in September , Dostoevsky explained to him that the work was to be about a young man who yields to "certain strange, 'unfinished' ideas, yet floating in the air". From then on, Crime and Punishment is referred to as a novel.
