Crime and Punishment (Everyman's Library Classics & Contemporary Classics) [Hardcover]

"For those who have vision and the courage to follow it, there is no law and no crime and no punishment, only a revaluation of all values." So declares Rodya Raskolnikov the young Russian intellectual living in ugly poverty. In order to eat, he is forced to pawn precious possessions for a few roubles to the greedy "cockroach", Alyona. If he kills her, Rodya argues, he commits no crime: rather he will rid the world of a "filthy insect", just like one of the cockroaches the listener can hear being crushed beneath his boots. As Alyona examines Rodya's silver cigarette case, he brings his axe down upon her with the horrifying sound of steel hitting human flesh. Despite this not being a crime, Rodya suffers fearful guilt--and inevitable punishment. It is Sonya, the abused young woman forced into prostitution by her drunken father, who holds the power of Rodya's redemption. Dramatisation is a superb vehicle for this tense psychological masterpiece and the performances are powerful: the baiting of Rodya by Jim Norton as Petrovich, the police officer who suspects Rodya's guilt, is chilling; while Barnaby Kay skilfully conveys Rodya's duality as his human conscience, breathless with panic, argues with his controlled and truculent intellect. --Running time approx 2 hours 50 minutes

--Rachel Redford --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Reaches as close to Dostoevsky s Russian as is possible in English...The original s force and frightening immediacy is captured...The Pevear and Volokhonsky translation will become the standard English version. --Chicago Tribune

This fresh, new translation...provides a more exact, idiomatic, and contemporary rendition of the novel that brings Fyodor Dostoevsky s tale achingly alive...It succeeds beautifully --San Francisco Chronicle --This text refers to an alternate Hardcover edition.

'The old woman was merely a sickness . . .it wasn't a human being I killed, it was a principle!' Raskolnikov, Crime and Punishment --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed)

Dostoevsky’s drama of sin, guilt, and redemption transforms the sordid story of an old woman’s murder into the nineteenth century’s profoundest and most compelling philosophical novel.

Raskolnikov, an impoverished student living in the St. Petersburg of the tsars, is determined to overreach his humanity and assert his untrammeled individual will. When he commits an act of murder and theft, he sets into motion a story that, for its excruciating suspense, its atmospheric vividness, and its depth of characterization and vision is almost unequaled in the literatures of the world. The best known of Dostoevsky’s masterpieces, Crime and Punishment can bear any amount of rereading without losing a drop of its power over our imaginations.

Award-winning translators Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky render this elusive and wildly innovative novel with an energy, suppleness, and range of voice that do full justice to the genius of its creator.

Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky was born in Moscow in 1821, the 2nd of 7 children. From 1849 to 1854 he lived in a convict prison, and in later years his passion for gambling led him deeply into debt. In 1880 he delivered his famous address at theunveiling of Pushkin's memorial in Moscow; he died six months later in 1881. David McDuff has translated a number of nineteenth-century Russian prose works for the Penguin Classics series. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.