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Crime and Punishment

by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Category: Fiction

Status: Available

Source: Public Domain — Project Gutenberg

About This Book

"Crime and Punishment" by Fyodor Dostoevsky is a novel published in 1866. It follows Rodion Raskolnikov, an impoverished former law student in Saint Petersburg who plans to murder an unscrupulous pawnbroker. He convinces himself that certain crimes are justifiable if committed by "extraordinary" men pursuing higher goals. Once the deed is done, however, he is consumed by confusion, paranoia, and guilt as his theoretical justifications crumble and he faces the internal and external consequences of his actions. (This is an automatically generated summary.)

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CRIME AND PUNISHMENT

By Fyodor Dostoevsky

Translated By Constance Garnett

TRANSLATOR’S PREFACE

A few words about Dostoevsky himself may help the English reader to understand his work.

Dostoevsky was the son of a doctor. His parents were very hard-working and deeply religious people, but so poor that they lived with their five children in only two rooms. The father and mother spent their evenings in reading aloud to their children, generally from books of a serious character.

Though always sickly and delicate Dostoevsky came out third in the final examination of the Petersburg school of Engineering. There he had already begun his first work, “Poor Folk.”

This story was published by the poet Nekrassov in his review and was received with acc

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About This Edition

This edition of Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky is catalogued on Libreya under Fiction and runs approximately 203,622 words — about 1018 minutes of reading at an average pace. It is sourced from Project Gutenberg, the world's oldest digital library of public domain literature, founded in 1971 by Michael Hart, and every text on Libreya has been verified to be free of copyright restrictions in the United States. You can view the original Project Gutenberg edition here.

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About Classic Fiction

Classic fiction represents the highest achievements of literary imagination. The novels in this genre have shaped how generations of readers understand human nature, society, and the fundamental questions of existence. Reading 19th and early 20th-century novels offers far more than historical interest: these stories explore love, ambition, morality, and identity with an insight that remains startlingly relevant today. Authors like Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Austen, Hardy, and Dickens wrote for readers much like us — people trying to make sense of a complicated world — and their observations on class, relationships, power, and conscience carry across centuries with barely diminished force. Classic fiction is also where the novel as an art form reached some of its greatest heights: innovative narrative structures, deeply realized characters, and prose styles that reward slow, attentive reading. These are not museum pieces. They are living works that continue to be discussed, adapted, and argued over because they capture something essential and enduring about human experience.

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