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as channelled through the rogue Masloboyev in
The Insulted and the Injured
( 1861 ), makes even his weakest novel memorable. Perhaps, like Razumikhin, Dostoyevsky thought that ‘fibbing’ would bring him to the truth, or at least to a more complete picture of the truth than that provided by his tendentious writing in non-fictional genres.
    Certainly, in the much-disputed epilogue to
Crime and Punishment
the ‘truth’ remains elusive. Some will conclude that Raskolnikov rediscovers himself in his rediscovery of his native land and native people; others will cite his own astonishment at ‘the dreadful, unbridgeable gulf that lay between him and all these commoners’ and his own enduring confusion about his ‘crime’. Some, following one of Dostoyevsky’s sharpest critics and biographers, Konstantin Mochulsky, have read the epilogue as a ‘pious lie’ – an unconvincing conversion to Christianity; others remain unpersuaded that any conversion takes place at all. What is beyond dispute is that these final pages, filled with a restrained joy, show Dostoyevsky at his most tender and his writing at its most delicate. Here, one would like to think, the autobiographical subtext is far from arbitrary. For as he wrote these pages Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky was himself setting out on a new path, taking with him a new wife – his stenographer, Anna Grigoryevna – and, no doubt, the very best intentions.
    NOTES
    1 . From Woolf’s essay ‘The Russian Point of View’ in
The Common Reader
( 1925 ). The quotation describes the experience of reading Dostoyevsky in general, but is especially appropriate to
Crime and Punishment
.
    2 . Joseph Frank,
Dostoevsky: A Writer in His Time
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010 ), p. 460 .
    3 . My translation from F. M. Dostoyevsky,
Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v tridtsati tomakh
(Leningrad: Nauka, 1972– 90 ), vol. 28 . 2 , p. 136 .
    4 . The one exception is the protagonist’s class of origin, which seems closer to impoverished gentry than trade, but which is in any case left strikingly vague – the better to emphasize his status as a ‘former student’.
    5 . As described by the narrator of Dostoyevsky’s
Notes from Underground
( 1864 ).
    6 . The reference to Raskolnikov’s ‘Satanic pride’ comes from Dostoyevsky’s notebooks; Dostoyevsky,
Polnoe sobranie sochinenii
, vol. 7 , p. 149 .
    7 . See Derek Offord’s article ‘
Crime and Punishment
and Contemporary Radical Thought’, reprinted in
Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment: A Casebook
, ed. Richard Peace (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006 ), pp. 119– 48 .
    8 . The Soviet-era film
Twenty-Six Days in the Life of Dostoyevsky
(
Dvadtsat’ shest’ dnei iz zhizni Dostoevskogo
, 1980 ) captures all the drama of that month – October 1866 .
    9 . Frank,
Dostoyevsky: A Writer in His Time
, p. 484 .
    1 0 . This latter topic sparks some fascinating reflections on Dostoyevsky in Lesley Chamberlain’s
Motherland: A Philosophical History of Russia
(London: Atlantic, 2004 ), pp. 173– 82 .
    1 1 . Mikhail Bakhtin,
Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics
, translated and edited by Caryl Emerson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984 ).
    1 2 . On Raskolnikov as ‘media man’ and the ‘subsumption of the social world by the discursive reality of the press’, see Konstantine Klioutchkine, ‘The Rise of
Crime and Punishment
from the Air of the Media’,
Slavic Review
, vol. 61 , no. 1 (Spring, 2002 ), pp. 88– 108 . I would argue that in
Crime and Punishment
the social world is subsumed not only by the press, however, but by literature more broadly.
    1 3 . The literariness of Russian legal culture in this period has been superbly analysed by Kathleen Parthé in ‘Who Speaks the Truth? Writers vs Lawyers’,
Universals and Contrasts
(The Journal of