A destitute student in St. Petersburg murders a pawnbroker with an axe, convinced that extraordinary men stand above moral law, and spends the rest of the novel discovering, in fever and paranoia and anguished conversation, that he is not the Napoleon he imagined. Dostoevsky wrote with the velocity of a man pursued by creditors and demons alike, and the result is a novel that reads less like fiction than like the desperate testimony of a soul on trial. Raskolnikov wanders the summer streets, confesses to a prostitute who reads him the raising of Lazarus, and is brought at last to his knees. It is the most harrowing study of conscience in all literature, the proof that no idea, however brilliant, can survive the weight of innocent blood.