Crime and PunishmentFyodor Dostoyevsky

Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment, published in 1866, follows a poor ex-student named Raskolnikov through the murder of a pawnbroker, the months of psychological collapse that follow, and the confession and exile that do not so much resolve the crime as transpose it into another key. The book is often described as a detective novel in which the criminal is known from the first page. What it investigates is the effect of the act on the man who committed it.

Raskolnikov commits the murder on the basis of a theory. He has written an article arguing that extraordinary men have the right to step over moral law for the sake of great ends, and he decides to test whether he belongs to that class. The testing destroys him. He cannot spend the money he stole. He cannot think of anything but what he did. He cannot keep the secret from those he loves, and the secret itself becomes the one reality of his life. The theory shattered against a fact it had not predicted: the self that committed the act has to go on being that self.

Against Raskolnikov stand the prostitute Sonya, whose suffering is accepted rather than theorized, and the examining magistrate Porfiry, whose patient psychological pressure is offered as a kind of mercy. The book is the Syntopicon's modern text on sin and punishment considered together, because Dostoyevsky insists that the punishment is worked out in the soul that committed the act, and that the confession at the end is the beginning rather than the close of the penalty.