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. Fifty-two plates by painters including Ivan Kramskoi and Ivan Shishkin carry the novel's rooms, forests and portraits of reading women, the quiet Russian world through which the student walks to the pawnbroker.