Crime and Punishment [antikvár]

Introduction When in 1866 the first part of Crime and Funishment was pubUshed in the January and February issues of Mikhail Kat-kov's journal the Russian Messenger, it met with instant public success. The remaining parts of the novel had still to be written, its author was struggling through poverty and debt to meet deadlines that loomed ever closer, yet both he and his readers sensed that this was a work that possessed an inner momentum of its own, one that was linked both to the inexorable processes of outer, social change and to those of an inner, spiritual awakening. 'The novel promises to be one of the most important works of the author of The House of the Dead,' an anonymous reviewer wrote. The terrible crime that forms the basis of this tale is described with such staggering veracity, in such subtle detail, that one finds oneself involuntarily experiencing the peripeteias of this drama with all its psychic springs and devices, traversing the heart's maze from the first inception within it of the criminal idea to its final development . . . Even the author's subjectivity, from which the characterization of his heroes has on occasion suffered, in this instance produces no harm whatsoever, as it is focused on a single character and is permeated by a typological clarity, artistic in nature. As the subsequent parts of the novel began to appear it acquired the status of a social and public event. In his memoirs, the critic N. N. Strakhov recalled that in Russia Crime and Punishment was the literary sensation of the year, 'the only book the addicts of reading talked about. And when they talked