In the Library
Crime and Punishment
Fyodor Dostoevsky, 1866
- Form
- Form Novel
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Moderate
- Reading time
- Reading time 15 hours
- Translated by
- Translated by Constance Garnett
- Original
- Original ru
- Chapters
- Chapters 41
- Length
- Length 203k words
Free in the app
Read in the app, yours for good.
The first button opens the book in the app when it is installed; the badge gets the app.
Pain and suffering are always inevitable for a large intelligence and a deep heart.
What buying means
- Yours for good, on every iPhone you sign in to.
- Read in the app’s own reader, with the original beside the translation where there is one.
- Downloaded, so it reads with no signal.
- The same price as in the app. Folio already opens every book on this shelf; buying keeps this one after Folio ends. A refund takes it back.
The reading guide, in the app
How to Read Crime and Punishment
A book so weighed down by its reputation as a heavy Russian classic that almost nobody warns you it is, underneath all of that, a feverish psychological thriller you will struggle to put down.
The reputation of Crime and Punishment is that it is grim, vast, and improving, the kind of Russian novel you read so that you can say you have read it, full of long names and longer philosophical arguments and a gloom that settles on you for the duration. The gloom is real and almost everything else about that reputation gets the book wrong. What is actually waiting inside is a tense, fast, claustrophobic crime story, built around a murder that happens early and a hunt for the murderer that is conducted almost entirely inside one man’s own skull, and it moves with the pull of the most addictive thriller you have ever read.
If you like this, try
About the book
An axe, an old pawnbroker, a theory that some men are permitted to kill. Raskolnikov, a starving ex-student in a St. Petersburg July so hot the city itself seems delirious, talks himself into the murder to prove he is one of the extraordinary few who stand above the moral law. Then he discovers what no theory accounted for: that the mind keeps its own ledger, and a conscience cannot be reasoned out of existence. What follows is less a chase than a slow tightening, Raskolnikov circling the truth, the detective Porfiry circling him, until the only relief left is to be caught. Dostoevsky writes fever from the inside, the swarming streets and the cold sweat and the half-mad logic that feels, line by line, exactly like your own worst three a.m. And then, impossibly, he offers a way back, through the love of a woman who has nothing and forgives everything.