Crime and Punishment

Dostoevsky's 1866 novel follows Raskolnikov, a penniless former student in St Petersburg who convinces himself that an extraordinary man may step over the law for a higher purpose, and murders an old pawnbroker with an axe, killing her gentle sister too when she walks in. The question is not who did it but what the crime does to him: fever, fear and lies; his meetings with the drunken clerk Marmeladov and his daughter Sonya, forced into prostitution to feed her family; the sinister Svidrigailov; and the patient investigator Porfiry, who plays with him like a cat with a mouse until Sonya's love points him toward confession.

It turned the crime story into a journey through conscience and remains one of the great novels of ideas, on morality, freedom and redemption. This translation, of 1914, is by Constance Garnett. In Arabic it is best known in Sami al-Droubi's translation of Dostoevsky's complete works. His last and largest novel is The Brothers Karamazov.

Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821–1881) was sentenced to death in 1849 for his part in a radical circle, reprieved at the last moment and sent to hard labour in Siberia, which he described in The House of the Dead.

His great novels, Crime and Punishment, The Idiot and The Brothers Karamazov, turn questions of guilt, faith and freedom into stories; White Nights is a gentle place to start.