Crime and Punishment: by Fyodor Dostoevsky | Hardcover Format

Crime and Punishment — Fyodor DostoevskySaint Petersburg, 1865. A former law student, ravaged by poverty and pride, devises in the silence of his attic room a theory: there exist two categories of men — the mass, subject to moral law, and the extraordinary, authorized to transgress in order to advance history. To verify his thesis, Rodion Raskolnikov murders an old pawnbroker with an axe. But he also kills, by accident, her sister — an innocent figure he had not factored into his equation. And it is precisely this unforeseen variable that fractures the system.This novel is not a crime story. It is the clinical autopsy of a modern soul — that is, of a soul severed from the Principle, abandoned to a hypertrophied intellect that believes itself authorized to manufacture its own laws. Raskolnikov is the rationalist man taken to his logical conclusion: having rejected all transcendence, he becomes his own god, his own lawgiver, his own judge. And he discovers, through flesh and fever, that human conscience is not a calculation but a metaphysical reality no theory can defuse.Facing him stand two essential figures:Porfiry Petrovich, the magistrate, who seeks not proof but confession — the embodiment of a justice higher than procedure, who knows the guilty man will deliver himself up because he must.Sonia Marmeladova, the prostitute by sacrifice, a Christic and sacerdotal feminine figure, who reads to Raskolnikov the resurrection of Lazarus and follows him to the Siberian penal colony — not to save him, but to make his reintegration possible.What Dostoevsky stages here, in 1866, is the central pathology of the modern world: the idea that man, having rejected Heaven, can hoist himself into its place. Raskolnikov's crime is not the murder itself — it is intellectual pride, the hypertrophy of the self cut off from any higher principle. And his redemption is neither psychological nor moral in the modern sense of the term: it is an initiatic descent — the coffin-room, the fever, the Siberian camp — followed by a resurrection made possible through the mediation of a sacrificial feminine figure and through reintegration into a living tradition: Russian Orthodoxy, whose contemplative and esoteric dimension remained, at the end of the nineteenth century, one of the last authentic paths preserved in Europe.To read Crime and Punishment today is to read the most precise diagnosis ever made of the sickness of our age: the notion that man can dispense with the sacred, that he can decide alone what is just, that he can transgress without consequence so long as the transgression is rationally justified. One hundred and sixty years later, this notion has only expanded — and Dostoevsky's novel has only gained in relevance.What you will find in this book:A psychological thriller of unmatched intensity.A radical critique of nihilism, atheist socialism, and modern individualism — written before these ideologies had even produced their historical fruits.A meditation on guilt, redemption, and the traditional meaning of suffering.A gallery of characters (Marmeladov, Svidrigailov, Razumikhin, Dunya) among the most powerful in all of world literature.An initiation, in the strongest sense of the word, disguised as a novel. Read more