This book may be 'thought inspiring' however the book can be quite mind numbing and boring at times, and a real drag to get through ( )

excellent translation. ( )

I have already stated in a previous review that I love Dostoevsky, so keep that in mind. This novel, although though provoking and philosophically sound, is at times in desperate need of an editor.

It seems like the more verbose version of Poe's Telltale Heart. ( )

This is a beautiful book that looks into the state of the human condition and examines a typically russian character and his moral shortcomings. I have always enjoyed the russian authors worldview and find they show beauty in the difficult aspects of life and survival against a backdrop of harsh environment and endemic poverty. It is the character development that is particularly fascinating and the reader finds themselves in a state of empathy with a morally dubious protagonist. If you enjoy pondering the grey areas of life and the thorny end of society and morality, this book covers it extremely well ( )

I had a really hard time getting through this book. It just didn't get to me. I know this sounds crass, but when I tell people my opinion, I say, "It was too Russian." ( )

I have to agree that this is the greatest novel ever written. ( )

Couldn't get through it. Hard to criticize a classic but it sure seemed to drag for me. ( )

Ah, literature at its best! A fantastic read. ( )

"Crime and Punishment" was one of my first loves in literature. Dostoevsky led a dark life: his father was murdered by his own serfs, he faced a firing squad and was spared at the last moment, and he spent four years of hard labor in Siberia. He also lived during a time of great social and intellectual debate in Russia, a time that among other things saw the emancipation of the serfs, nihilism, socialism, and ermerging questions about the relevance of God. He loved and I think personified Russia in the midst of this swirl and his works to me are characterized by both individual and intellectural torment. Out of this crucible comes genius.

Some quotes...
On Crime; I found it ironic the "temporary insanity" defense was referred to as fashionable in 1866 Russia:
"But they immediately drew the deduction that the crime could only have been committed through temporary mental derangement, through homicidal mania, without object or the pursuit of gain. This fell in with the most recent fashionable theory of temporary insanity, so often applied in our days in criminal cases."

On the preciousness of life:
“Where is it I’ve read that someone condemned to death says or thinks, an hour before his death, that if he had to live on some high rock, on such a narrow ledge that he’d only room to stand, and the ocean, everlasting darkness, everlasting solitude, everlasting tempest around him, if he had to remain standing on a square yard of space all his life, a thousand years, eternity, it were better to live so than to die at once! Only to live, to live and live! Life, whatever it may be!”

On memories and how quick things can change; what a great description of Raskolnikov's state of mind:
"It struck him as strange and grotesque that he should have stopped at the same spot as before, as though he actually imagined he could think the same thoughts, be interested in the same theories and pictures that had interested him…so short a time ago. He felt it almost amusing, and yet it wrung his heart. Deep down, hidden far away out of sight all that seemed to him now – all his old past, his old thoughts, his old problems and theories, his old impressions and the pictures and himself and all, all…He felt as though he were flying upwards, and everything were vanishing from his sight."

On repentance:
"He suddenly recalled Sonia’s words, “Go to the cross-roads, bow down to the people, kiss the earth, for you have sinned against it too, and say aloud to the whole world, ‘I am a murderer’.” He trembled, remembering that. And the hopeless misery and anxiety of all that time, especially the last hours, had weighed so heavily upon him that he positively clutched at the chance of this new unmixed, complete sensation. It came over him like a fit; it was like a single spark kindled in his soul and spreading fire through him. Everything in him softened at once and the tears started into his eyes. He fell to the earth on the spot…
He knelt down in the middle of the square, bowed down to the earth, and kissed that filthy earth with bliss and rapture. He got up and bowed down a second time."

"He thought of her. He remembered how continually he had tormented her and wounded her heart….he knew with what infinite love he would now repay all her sufferings. And what were all, all the agonies of the past! Everything, even his crime, his sentence and imprisonment, seemed to him now in the first rush of feeling an external, strange fact with which he had no concern….he was simply feeling. Life had stepped into the place of theory and something quite different would work itself out in his mind. … But that is the beginning of a new story – the story of the gradual renewal of man, the story of his gradual regeneration, of his passing from one world into another, of his initiation into a new unknown life. That might be the subject of a new story, but our present story is ended."

On Socialism:
"'…It began with the socialist doctrine. You know their doctrine; crime is a protest against the abnormality of the social organization and nothing more, and nothing more; no other causes admitted!…” … “Everything with them is the ‘influence of the environment’, and nothing else. Their favorite phrase! From which if follows that, if society is normally organized, all crime will cease at once, since there will be nothing to protest against and all men will become righteous in one instant. Human nature is not taken into account, it is excluded, it’s not supposed to exist! They don’t recognize that humanity, developing by a historical living process, will become at last a normal society, but they believe that a social system that has come out of some mathematical brain is going to organize all humanity at once and make it just and sinless in an instant, quicker than any living process! … That’s why they so dislike the living process of life; they don’t want a living soul! The living soul demands life, the soul won’t obey the rule of mechanics, the soul is an object of suspicion, the soul is retrograde! But what they want though it smells of death and can be made of india-rubber, at least is not alive, has no will, is servile and won’t revolt!'"

A prelude to "God is Dead" and the Superman:
"…Once mankind has renounced God, one and all (and I believe that this period, analogous to the geological periods, will come), then the entire old world view will fall of itself, without anthropophagy, and, above all, the entire former morality, and everything will be new. People will come together in order to take from life all that it can give, but, of course, for happiness and joy in this world only. Man will be exalted with the spirit of the divine, titanic pride, and then man-god will appear. Man, his will and his science no longer limited, conquering nature every hour, will thereby every hour experience such lofty delight as will replace for him all his former hopes of heavenly delight. Each will know himself utterly mortal, without resurrection, and will accept death proudly and calmly, like a god. Out of pride he will understand that he should not murmur against the momentariness of life, and he will love his brother then without any reward…”

And again here, ahead of his time and as on other issues, with such incredible weight:
“…I maintain that if the discoveries of Kepler and Newton could not have been made known except by sacrificing the lives of one, a dozen, a hundred, or more men, Newton would have had the right, would indeed have been duty bound…to eliminate the dozen or the hundred men for the sake of making his discoveries known to the whole of humanity. … men are in general divided by a law of nature into two categories, inferior (ordinary), that is, so to say, material that serves only to reproduce its kind, and men who have the gift or the talent to utter a new word. … The first category, generally speaking, are men conservative in temperament and law-abiding; they live under control and love to be controlled. To my thinking it is their duty to be controlled … The second category all transgress the law; they are destroyers or disposed to destruction according to their capacities. The crimes of these men are of course relative and varied; for the most part they seek in very varied ways the destruction of the present for the sake of the better … There’s no need for much anxiety, however; the masses will scarcely ever admit this right, they punish them or hang them (more or less), and in doing so fulfill quite justly their conservative vocation. But the same masses set these criminals on a pedestal in the next generation and worship them (more or less). The first category is always the man of the present, the second the man of the future. The first preserve the world and people it, the second move the world and lead it to its goal….”
“Thank you. But tell me this: how do you distinguish those extraordinary people from the ordinary ones? … Tell me, please, are there many people who have the right to kill others, these extraordinary people? I am ready to bow down to them, of course, but you must admit it’s alarming if there are a great many of them, eh? … “
“…but what is really original in all this, and is exclusively your own, to my horror, is that you sanction bloodshed in the name of conscience, and excuse my saying so, with such fanaticism…That sanction of bloodshed, by conscience, is, to my mind … more terrible than the official legal sanction of bloodshed…”
“…When you were writing your article, surely you couldn’t have helped, he-he! fancying yourself…just a little, an ‘extraordinary’ man, uttering a new word in your sense…That’s so, isn’t it?”

And one last one illustrating the fallacy of justifying violence:
“Brother, brother, what are you saying? Why, you have shed blood?” cried Dounia in despair.
“Which all men shed,” he put in almost frantically, “which flows and has always flowed in streams, which is spilt like champagne, and for which men are crowned in the Capitol and are called afterwards benefactors of mankind. … I too wanted to do good to men and would have done hundreds, thousands of good deeds to make up for that one piece of stupidity …”

On the younger generation; it always makes me smile when reading passages about how society is going to "hell and handbasket" because of the next generation:
"…crime has been greatly on the increase among the lower classes during the last five years, not to speak of the cases of robbery and arson everywhere, what strikes me as the strangest thing is that in the higher classes, too, crime is increasing proportionately. … how are we to explain this demoralization of the civilized part of our society?"

"Andrey Semyonovitch really was rather stupid; he attached himself to the cause of progress and “our younger generation” from enthusiasm. He was one of the numerous and varied legions of dullards, of half-animate abortions, conceited, half-educated coxcombs, who attach themselves to the idea most in fashion only to vulgarize it and who caricature every cause they serve, however sincerely." ( )

Maybe the only old novel I can stand. Great psychology and vivid characters, a really emotive book. DON'T READ THE EPILOGUE. God I hate that epilogue. ( )

This book is such a heavy read and it has that psychology thing going with it, you'll start to question your own morals and about the end justifying the means. The setting is horrendous and the poverty at that time made things worse. "Enjoy" is not really the word I would use to describe reading this book 'cause I felt that I was still studying. Sometimes I had to read the lines/paragraphs twice because of the fine print but in its general context, I loved the book. It has a good translation and excellent plot. Characters were introduced and Dostoevsky gave us a ride to Raskolnikov's brain. ( )

I read this in a lit class. It was pretty heavy and like typical Russian lit, not very uplifting. The protagonist devolves as a person after committing a murder, which leads to other murders. It is reminiscent of Shakespeare's Macbeth.

This book is the reason I love Dostoevsky. He puts his truth in the most unlikely characters and finds his salvation in the most unlikely places.

When I lived in St. Petersburg, I had to do the Crime and Punishment walk, the highlight of which is finding Rodion's garret room. There's graffiti on the wall outside "his" door from all his fans and supporters. It's the greatest. ( )

If you want to start on Dostoyevsky's classics "Crime and Punishment" is the most accessible. Raskolnikov is as enthralling and troubled a protagonist as Hamlet. Now, if you don't like "anguish of the mind" Raskolnikov will drive you to distraction. For a fan of the melancholic, like me, he is just a super hero! That only leaves the problem of... Sonya. Is she just too much of a super angel? It's the only criticism of the book I can think of.

Crime and Punishment is simply a staggering achievement. Even more so, I believe, than "The Brothers Karamazov" because it is so much more pared down and readable. For me, Dostoyevsky beats Dickens hands down. Dostoyevsky goes so much deeper into the human condition as well as brilliantly evoking life in 19C Moscow and is a much more modern author. What a genius he was. ( )

If I had to make a list of books that got under my skin, this would be number one, way above anything else. Do I want to write this..the idea of murder and that you may get carried away with that idea and actually do it is one that really got to me. The interrogation scenes often play out in different variations in my dreams. Unforgettable. ( )

Great book. I found the epilogue to be disappointing. ( )

gripping....extremely ( )

I responded more strongly to this book than to any other in recent memory. For a couple hundred pages, I clenched my fists, shut the book after reading only a couple of pages, etc. Somehow I pictured one of the victims as my late Polish grandmother. Though I had read reviews where people thought there was not enough crime and too much punishment, I didn't find enough "punishment" for the criminal during those fist-clenching pages. I have always wanted to read this book, though, and am glad I fought my way through it. I am now reading an Aug. 3 and Aug. 10/17, 2009 two-part New Yorker article, loosely related to the final location of the book, not to give anything away as long as you don't look up your New Yorkers. ( )

I can't see to add anything but the best stuff. ( )

Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment stands as one of literatures greatest explorations of the human psyche, well the base part of that psyche.

There is not much that is pleasant in the world of Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikov. Following his planned murder of the pawnbroker Alena Ivanovna and the subsequent murder of Lizaveta , the sister who stumbles into the scene of the crime we are propelled through his swirling half mad mind.

In a series of set pieces he attempts to rationalise and understand his behaviour whilst simultaneously dealing with the usual criminal issues of guilt, paranoia and abjection.

Murder, alcoholism, mental illness, child cruelty, domestic abuse, etc, etc Dostoevsky minutely examines each and more through the characters that swirl around Raskolnikov in his 19th Century Petersburg.

Go on, immerse yourself in the depravity and inertia that is the mind of Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikov. ( )

thought i wouldn't like this but i did. i am a little too distracted at the moment for books on cd and it took me a month with many replays. the reader was excellent ( )

I used to read this before I preached on Sunday Morning.

Dostoyevsky's best and its a close race. ( )

I'm glad I've read it. However, I wish I had read it in my 20s or 30s, I would have appreciated it more. Right now, I simply had no patience for all the mental dialogues and angst and no sympathy whatsoever for Raskolnikov. His sister now, she's another story! One of the best drawn women in fiction I have ever read. Obviously the writing is very fine, that's why my daughter made me read this; it just isn't something which made my soul soar, more like made my soul sore. ( )

Crime and Punishment is a very intense book but well worth the effort it takes to read it. It is the story of a bright but mentally tortured student (Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikov) whose views of human nature initially make him believe that he is justified in committing murder. He kills the pawnbroker Alena Ivanovna and her sister Lizaveta, who unexpectedly stumbles upon the scene. Raskolnikov spends a lot of time trying to analyze his motives. First he tells the character Sonia: "It was to rob her" but that motive is false and he dismisses it quickly. Next he says "I wanted to make myself a Napoleon." His last motive describes the murder as an extreme act of self-revelation: "I longed to kill without casuistry, to kill for my own benefit and for that alone! I did not commit murder in order to use the profits and power gained to make myself a benefactor to humanity. Rubbish! I simply murdered; I murdered for myself, for myself alone ... it was only to test myself." He commits the murder not "because" he is an extraordinary man but to "see" if he is an extraordinary man. The ultimate outcome suggests he is not. At the very end of the book, Raskolnikov finally accepts responsibility for his act. Most of the book however is devoted to what goes on in his mind in the days following the murder.

Sonia and Razumikhin are two other memorable characters in the book. The name "Sonia" comes from the Greek word for "wisdom." Sonia is a fervent believer in Christianity and the power of suffering. As a character, she is the embodiment of goodness. She is a meek, gentle creature who symbolizes the suffering of humanity and the power of redemption. Dmitri Prokofich Razumikhin is Raskolnikov's friend. He is not as brilliant as Raskolnikov but also he is not tortured by high-minded theories. He always wants to believe the best about his friend. Like Sonia, he is an example of goodness, but without the religious elements found in Sonia's character. Razumikhin's name is derived from the Russian word razum for reason. Razumikhin is a model of friendship – he sticks by Raskolnikov through everything.

Suffering pervades the book. For example, prostitution (Sonia), drunkeness (Marmeladov), crimes of various sorts (Raskolnikov, Svidrigailov), disease (Katherina Ivanovna's tuberculosis), poverty (Raskolnikov, Sonia, the Marmeladovs, Rasumikhin), despair and suicide (Svidrigailov), and unrequited desire (Svidrigailov, Lushin). Svidrigailov ends his criminal career with despair and suicide whereas Raskolnikov rejects suicide and eventually confesses his crime and accepts punishment, but only at the very end of the book does he truly repent his crime and achieve redemption. The squalor of Petersburg during the summer also figures prominently in the book. ( )