Crime and Punishment

Rodion Raskolnikov is a former law student living in a room so small he can touch the walls from his bed, in a Saint Petersburg summer that Dostoevsky renders as almost unbreathable. He has stopped attending lectures, stopped seeing people, and has been thinking his way toward a theory: that extraordinary men are permitted to step over ordinary moral limits, and that he may be one of them. He tests it on an elderly pawnbroker with an axe.

The murder happens early. The rest of the novel is the consequence, and the consequence is not what Raskolnikov expected. He does not get away with it and he does not get caught, at least not quickly. Instead he is pursued, gently and relentlessly, by an examining magistrate named Porfiry Petrovich who never quite accuses him, and by his own body, which keeps betraying him with fevers and faints.

It reads far faster than its reputation suggests. Dostoevsky was writing to serial deadlines and it shows in the best way: chapters end on hooks, the plot keeps moving, and there are long stretches of something close to comedy. The philosophical argument is carried in dialogue rather than lecture.

Be prepared for the intensity. Almost every character talks at the top of their voice about the largest possible subjects, and the emotional register rarely drops for long. The supporting cast is where much of the richness sits, particularly Raskolnikov's sister and the ruined official Marmeladov, whose family draws the novel toward its only real source of grace.

Give it fifty pages and the pressure becomes the pleasure. Choose a modern translation if you can, since the older ones flatten the comedy out of it.