Crime and Punishment

What It Is

A novel published in monthly instalments through 1866 in the journal The Russian Messenger, written under financial pressure so severe that Dostoevsky was drafting another novel simultaneously to satisfy a contract that would otherwise have handed a publisher the rights to everything he ever wrote. He made both deadlines. The strain is in the book, and it is one of the reasons it burns.

The setting is St Petersburg in a heatwave: tenement stairwells, taverns, garrets you cannot stand upright in, dust, canals, bad air and worse money. Dostoevsky knew those streets, and his city is one of the most physically oppressive places in fiction.

The tempo is a thriller's. Much of the machinery the modern crime novel still runs on was assembled here, and then turned to a use no crime novel has since attempted. What you are actually reading is the inside of a mind under pressure: the arguing with itself, the self-justification, the fever, and the terrible comedy of a man talking himself into things.

Why It Matters

Dostoevsky took an idea that was fashionable among clever young Russians in the 1860s — rational, godless, arithmetical about human beings, sure that a sufficiently good end could license any means — and instead of refuting it in an essay, he set it loose inside a mind and refused to look away.

He was in a position to know. He had spent four years in a Siberian labour camp among men whose lives had gone a long way past theory, and he had once been a young radical himself. Nobody has ever written better about what it is like to live inside an idea.

The twentieth century then went and proved his point at scale, which is why this book keeps being picked up by people trying to understand what happened to it. Nietzsche read him and called him the only psychologist he had anything to learn from. Freud, Camus, Sartre and the whole existentialist line are downstream. So is most serious writing about guilt.

Before You Read

About five hundred pages, fifteen to twenty hours, and considerably faster than its reputation. This is a page-turner. People who put off Dostoevsky for a decade tend to finish this one in a week and feel cheated of the decade.

Read it in large sittings. The novel works by accumulating pressure, and twenty pages a night lets the pressure out.

The one real obstacle is Russian names. Every character has a given name, a patronymic and a surname, plus diminutives that friends and enemies use differently, and a single person can turn up under four labels. Keep the character list open. Nobody is judging you.

Which Translation to Read

• Oliver Ready (Penguin Classics, 2014) — recommended. The best English Crime and Punishment there has been. Ready hears what other translators miss: the fever, the muttering, and above all the black comedy, which is not decoration but the thing that makes the horror bearable and the book great. His idiom is a slightly timeless mid-century English rather than an attempt at 1860s Russia, and it works. The cost: a handful of Britishisms, and readers who want a period surface will not find one here. View on Amazon →
• Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (Vintage, 1992). The most literal, and the most committed to preserving Dostoevsky's genuinely strange, ragged, repetitive Russian rather than tidying it. The cost: some of the awkwardness that reaches you is theirs, not his, and the prose can feel like it is being carried at arm's length.
• Michael Katz (Liveright, 2018). Crisp, clean, dependable, with good notes. A fine first Dostoevsky for a reader who wants to be sure of the ground. The cost: tidier than the original, and the delirium is a degree cooler than it should be.

Take Ready. Constance Garnett's 1914 version is free and perfectly readable, and it smooths the strangeness that is the whole point.

Getting the Most From This Book

Do not read the introduction first, and do not read a plot summary. Every introduction to this novel discusses it complete, and this is a book whose grip depends on not knowing where it will go next.

Watch the doubling. Almost every character the protagonist meets is a version of an argument he is having with himself, and Dostoevsky sets them in his path with the deliberateness of a man arranging mirrors.

Watch, too, how much of this novel consists of people talking themselves into things. It is the most acute book ever written about the stories we tell ourselves at three in the morning.

Dostoevsky is called difficult. He is not difficult. He is uncomfortable, which is a different thing, and he is one of the most readable novelists who ever lived.