Reading room

Crime and Punishment

Fyodor Dostoevsky

Rodion Raskolnikov, a poor St Petersburg student, kills an old pawnbroker with an axe — and her sister, an unexpected witness — to prove to himself that he belongs to the class of extraordinary men for whom everything is permitted. The novel is not about finding the culprit but about the inner punishment: the fever, the cat-and-mouse with the investigator Porfiry Petrovich and the love of Sonya Marmeladova, a prostitute out of necessity, who reads him the raising of Lazarus and follows him to Siberia. It is the most widely read of his works.