Crime And Punishment (Penguin Classics)

McDuff, David; Dostoyevsky, Fyodor

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0140445285 ISBN 13: 9780140445282

Publisher: Penguin Classics, 1991

Crime and Punishment (1866) is the story of a murder committed on principle, of a killer who wishes by his action to set himself outside and above society. A novel of great physical and psychological tension, pervaded by Dostoevsky's sinister evocation of St Petersburg, it also has moments of wild humour. Dostoevsky's own harrowing experiences mark the novel. He had himself undergone interrogation and trial, and was condemned to death, a sentence commuted at the last moment to penal servitude. In prison he was particularly impressed by one hardened murderer who seemed to have attained a spiritual equilibrium beyond good and evil: yet witnessing the misery of other convicts also engendered in Dostoevsky a belief in the Christian idea of salvation through suffering.

Review:

"The best [translation of "Crime and Punishment"] currently available...An especially faithful re-creation...with a coiled-spring kinetic energy...Don't miss it." -"Washington Post Book World"
"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"
"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"

"From the Hardcover edition."

"The best Ýtranslation of "Crime and Punishment"¨ currently available...An especially faithful re-creation...with a coiled-spring kinetic energy...Don't miss it." -"Washington Post Book World"
"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"
"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"

"From the Hardcover edition."

" The best [translation of "Crime and Punishment"] currently available... An especially faithful re-creation... with a coiled-spring kinetic energy... Don't miss it." - "Washington Post Book World"

About the Author:

Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky was born in Moscow in 1821. His debut, the epistolary novella Poor Folk(1846), made his name. In 1849 he was arrested for involvement with the politically subversive 'Petrashevsky circle' and until 1854 he lived in a convict prison in Omsk, Siberia. From this experience came The House of the Dead (1860-2). In 1860 he began the journal Vremya (Time). Already married, he fell in love with one of his contributors, Appollinaria Suslova, eighteen years his junior, and developed a ruinous passion for roulette. After the death of his first wife, Maria, in 1864, Dostoyevsky completed Notes from Underground and began work towards Crime and Punishment (1866). The major novels of his late period are The Idiot (1868), Demons(1871-2) and The Brothers Karamazov (1879-80). He died in 1881.