Crime and Punishment

By Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Words from the achiever

“My mother was a librarian, so from her, I got the taste to read. You wouldn’t believe it, but by the age of nine, I had already read Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment. I couldn’t sleep at night; it bothered me tremendously. I think I was living in my imagination much more than I was living in my realities. I was a reader. I was a dreamer.”

About the book

Dostoyevsky’s timeless tale of sin, remorse and redemption in the classic translation by Constance Garnett. Raskolnikov, a desperately poor student in 19th century St. Petersburg, murders an elderly pawnbroker and her daughter. At first, he imagines himself exempt from the laws that govern ordinary men, but little by little, he comes to terms with the awful significance of his crime.

Raskolnikov had a fearful dream. He dreamt he was back in his childhood in the little town of his birth. He was a child about seven years old, walking into the country with his father on the evening of a holiday. It was a grey and heavy day, the country was exactly as he remembered it; indeed he recalled it far more vividly in his dream than he had done in memory. The little town stood on a level flat as bare as the hand, not even a willow near it; only in the far distance, a copse lay, a dark blur on the very edge of the horizon.