Crime and Punishment (Signet Classics) - Softcover

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0451530063 ISBN 13: 9780451530066

Publisher: Signet Classics, 2006

Synopsis

One of the world's greatest novels, Crime and Punishment is the story of a murder and its consequences--an unparalleled tale of suspense set in the midst of nineteenth-century Russia's troubled transition to the modern age. In the slums of czarist St. Petersburg lives young Raskolnikov, a sensitive, intellectual student. The poverty he has always known drives him to believe that he is exempt from moral law. But when he puts this belief to the test and commits murder, there results unbearable suffering. Crime and punishment, the novel reminds us, "grow from the same seed.""No other novelist," wrote Irving Howe of Dostoyevsky, "has dramatized so powerfully the values and dangers, the uses and corruptions of systematized thought." But Sigmund Freud and others saw the Russian's work in a different light. Said Freud, "He might have been a liberator of mankind. Instead he chose to be its jailer.""He is the only psychologist I have anything to learn from."--Friedrich Nietzsche

About this title

Review:

"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

Review:

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

About this edition

• Publisher: Signet Classics
• Publication date: 2006
• ISBN 10: 0451530063
• ISBN 13: 9780451530066
• Binding: Mass Market Paperback
• Number of pages: 536