Fyodor Dostoevsky - Crime and Punishment (Oxford World’s Classics)

oxford worlds classics

CRIME AND PUNISHMENT

Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky was born in Moscow in 1821, the second in a family of seven children. His mother died of tuberculosis in 1837, and his father, a generally disliked army physician, died in apparently suspicious circumstances on his estate two years later. In 1843 he left the College of Military Engineering in St Petersburg and devoted himself to writing. Poor Folk (1846) met with great success from the literary critics of the day. In 1849 he was imprisoned and sentenced to death on account of his involvement with a group of utopian socialists, the Petrashevsky circle. The sentence was commuted at the last moment to penal servitude and exile, but the experience, described in Memoirs from the House of the Dead (18612), radically altered his political and personal ideology. In 1857, while still in exile, he married his first wife, Maria Dmitrievna Isaeva, returning to St Petersburg in 1859. In the early 1860s he founded two new literary journals, Time and The Epoch, and proved himself to be a brilliant journalist. He travelled in Europe, which served to strengthen his anti-European sentiment. Both his wife and his much-loved brother, Mikhail, died in 1864, the same year in which Notes from the Underground was published; Crime and Punishment and The Gambler followed in 1866, and in 1867 he married his stenographer, Anna Snitkina, who managed to bring an element of stability into his frenetic life. His other major novels, The Idiot (1868), Devils (1871), and The Brothers Karamazov (1880) met with varying degrees of success. In 1880 he was hailed as a saint, prophet, and genius by the audience to whom he delivered an address at the unveiling of the Pushkin memorial. He died seven months later in 1881; at the funeral thirty thousand people accompanied his coffin and his death was mourned throughout Russia.

Nicolas Pasternak Slater is the translator of several works by Boris Pasternak, including Family Correspondence 19211960 (2010) and Doctor Zhivago (appearing 2019). He has also published translations of stories by Lermontov, Pushkin, Tolstoy and Chekhov.

Sarah J. Young is Associate Professor of Russian at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London. She has written extensively on Dostoevsky.

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OXFORD WORLDS CLASSICS

FYODOR DOSTOEVSKY

Crime and Punishment

Translated by

NICOLAS PASTERNAK SLATER

With an Introduction and Notes by

SARAH J. YOUNG

Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, ox2 6dp , United Kingdom

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Translation Nicolas Pasternak Slater 2017

Editorial material Sarah J. Young 2017

The moral rights of the authors have been asserted

First published 2017

First published as an Oxford Worlds Classics paperback 2019

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ISBN 9780198709718

ebook ISBN 9780191019753

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