Crime and Punishment

A former student in a Petersburg garret works out that certain men are permitted to step over the line, and then tests the proposition with an axe. What follows is not detection but a long conversation with an examining magistrate who has no evidence and all the time in the world. Dostoevsky was writing against a gambling debt and had contracted to finish a second novel in the same months. A hundred plates from 1760 to 1925, among them Kotzebue and Polenov, follow the Petersburg streets, courtyards and reading rooms that frame the student's long argument with his examiner.