Crime and Punishment

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Book: Read Crime and Punishment for Free Online
Authors: Fyodor Dostoyevsky
the NY – St Petersburg Institute of Linguistics, Cognition and Culture), vol. 1 , no. 1 (Spring, 2012 ), pp. 155– 71 . See also Gary Rosenshield,
Western Law, Russian Justice: Dostoevsky, the Jury Trial, and the Law
(Madison, Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 2005 ).
    1 4 . This matches the ambivalence of Porfiry’s own position on the cusp of the reforms that were intended to create an independent judiciary. Educated under the old system, when (in the words of the historian Richard Pipes) ‘justice was a branch of the administration’, he will stay on with a new title under the new dispensation, owing to a lack of well-qualified new recruits – a suitable fate for a born actor like Porfiry, as well as an ironic comment on the ‘reforms’ themselves.
    1 5 . See Frank, pp. 151– 4 .
    1 6 . Victor Serge,
Memoirs of a Revolutionary
(New York: New York Review of Books, 2012 ), p. 327 .
    1 7 . The phrase ‘living life’ is taken from Dostoyevsky’s later novel,
The Adolescent
, but has a longer history in Russian literature.
    1 8 . From ‘Success’ in William Empson,
The Complete Poems
(London: Penguin Classics, 2001 ), p. 80 .
    1 9 . J. L. Rice,
Who Was Dostoevsky?
(Oakland, California: Berkeley Slavic Specialties, 2011 ), pp. 73– 104 , and the same author’s
Dostoevsky and the Healing Art
(Ann Arbor, Michigan: Ardis, 1985 ).

Further Reading
    Dostoyevsky’s own writings are the best place to start. Among the works that cast most light on
Crime and Punishment
are the early novella
The Double
( 1846 , but revised in the mid- 18 60s),
Notes from the Dead House
( 1860–2 ), and
Notes from Underground
( 1864 ). See, too,
The Notebooks for Crime and Punishment
, translated and edited by Edward Wasiolek (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967 ).
    Also recommended is the long line of fiction inspired (sometimes negatively) by
Crime and Punishment
or by the Dostoyevsky of that period. Among the highlights:
Under Western Eyes
( 1911 ) by Joseph Conrad;
Despair
( 1934 ; English translation 1965 ) by Vladimir Nabokov, Dostoyevsky’s most ungrateful reader;
Summer in Baden-Baden
(completed 1980 ; English translation 1987 ) by Leonid Tsypkin;
The Master of Petersburg
( 1994 ) by J. M. Coetzee; and, in a more light-hearted vein, the untranslated
F. M.
( 2006 ) by Boris Akunin.
    In the list of secondary reading that follows, categories inevitably blur; all the biographies, for example, are also exercises in literary criticism.
    BIOGRAPHY AND MEMOIR
    Robert Bird,
Fyodor Dostoevsky
(London: Reaktion Books, 2012 ). A short and stimulating reading of the life and works, and the threads that join them.
    Anna Dostoevsky,
Reminiscences
, translated and edited by Beatrice Stillman (London: Wildwood House, 1976 ). The memoirs of Dostoyevsky’s second wife: a unique, if inevitably partisan, portrait of a loving marriage.
    Joseph Frank,
Dostoevsky: A Writer in His Time
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010 ). The condensed version (running to almost 1 , 000 pages) of Frank’s five-volume literary biography, the fourth volume of which,
Dostoevsky: The Miraculous Years,
1865–71 (London: Robson Books, 1995 ), contains more detailed treatment of
Crime and Punishment
and the years in which it was written. Frank pays particular attention to the intellectual and ideological context from which Dostoyevsky’s fiction emerged.
    Konstantin Mochulsky,
Dostoevsky: His Life and Work
, translated by Michael A. Minihan (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967 ). Focused and highly readable.
    James L. Rice,
Who Was Dostoevsky?
(Oakland, California: Berkeley Slavic Specialties, 2011 ). A collection of articles towards a portrait of a ‘secular Dostoyevsky’ by one of his most contrarian interpreters.
    Peter Sekirin,
The Dostoevsky Archive: Firsthand Accounts of the Novelist from Contemporaries
’
Memoirs and Rare Periodicals
(Jefferson,

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