NovelContinental · 1866Study guide · no full textDemanding

Crime and Punishment

The crime takes thirty pages; the punishment takes four hundred. Dostoevsky's subject is not detection but the slow collapse of a justification.

Guilt Justice Madness Class

Study guide

This work is still in copyright, so there is no full text on the page. What you get instead: the context, the cast, the ideas and the themes — enough to read it well, and to know exactly what to watch for in the first thirty pages.

“Pain and suffering are always inevitable for a large intelligence and a deep heart.”

The cast, in the Character Atlas →Literary devices →Where it sits in time →

Go deeper

Class — how other works handle it →Guilt — how other works handle it →Madness — how other works handle it →Justice — how other works handle it →

The castFull atlas →

Raskolnikov

Student, in debt and in theory

Crime and Punishment · Fyodor Dostoevsky

Wants: To prove that some people are permitted things ordinary people are not.
Undone by: He has built a theory that requires him to be exceptional, and the murder is only the exam.

Sonya Marmeladova

Daughter of a drunkard, and a religious reader

Crime and Punishment · Fyodor Dostoevsky

Wants: To keep her family alive, and to keep believing that people can be returned to themselves.
Undone by: She gives away more than she can spare.

Now read the first page with all of this in mind.

The notes here are the map; the book is the journey.

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