Fyodor Dostoevsky
Crime and Punishment
1917 · 596 pages
- Author
- Fyodor Dostoevsky
- Edition
- Translated by Constance Garnett; edited with notes and introductions by William Allan Neilson; The Harvard Classics Shelf of Fiction, selected by Charles W. Eliot
- Published
- New York, P. F. Collier & Son Company, 1917
- Pages
- 596
- File
- DjVu, 19.1 MB
- Text search
- yes
- Rights
- public domain
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About the book
Crime and Punishment is the novel that made Fyodor Dostoevsky famous across Europe. It first appeared in instalments in the Moscow journal The Russian Messenger during 1866 and came out as a book the following year, after Dostoevsky had returned from Siberian exile and was struggling with debts.
Rodion Raskolnikov, a penniless former student in St Petersburg, persuades himself that an extraordinary person has the right to step over moral law, and kills an old pawnbroker with an axe. The rest of the book follows not the hunt for a murderer but the slow work of conscience: his fever and fear, his duel of wits with the investigator Porfiry Petrovich, and his bond with Sonya Marmeladova, a young woman forced into prostitution to feed her family, who leads him towards confession. An epilogue follows him to a Siberian prison.
Constance Garnett's translation, first published in 1914, was for decades the version through which English-speaking readers knew the novel, and it is still widely read.
Contents
Tap a chapter to open the book there.
About this edition
Constance Garnett's translation as reprinted in 1917 in the Harvard Classics Shelf of Fiction, the fiction series selected by Charles W. Eliot and published in New York by P. F. Collier & Son under arrangement with the Macmillan Company. The editor, William Allan Neilson, added a biographical note, four critical essays (by Eugène-Melchior de Vogüé, Kazimierz Waliszewski, the London Times and Maurice Baring) and a list of characters. A plate of Dostoevsky's study in St Petersburg faces the title page, and a full chapter-by-chapter contents list opens the volume. The scan has a text layer.
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Source
A scan from the Wikimedia Foundation's open projects. The book is in the public domain: free to read, download and share.