Introduction

Raskolnikov, a poor student who has dropped out for lack of fees, lives in a coffin-like garret in St Petersburg. He devises a theory: men are divided into the ordinary and the extraordinary, and extraordinary men like Napoleon have the right to step over moral limits for a great purpose. To prove that he belongs to the second kind, he kills an old woman pawnbroker with an axe, and in his panic kills her innocent sister too. He then falls prey to fear, fever and the torments of conscience he cannot escape, and plays a psychological game of cat and mouse with the shrewd examining magistrate Porfiry. At last Sonya, a girl forced into prostitution to support her family, leads him with her humble faith and love to confess, and follows him to Siberia. A summit of the psychological novel, it caused a sensation throughout Russia while it was being serialised. The work is translated in several volumes.