"This volume, the third of five in Joseph Frank's widely acclaimed biography of Dostoevsky, begins with the writer's return to St. Petersburg, after a ten-year Siberian exile. Having met with sudden fame as the highly praised young author of Poor Folk in 1845, Dostoevsky was abruptly forgotten after his arrest and exile for political conspiracy. He came back to the capital determined to reestablish his literary reputation. Now as the editor of and...

"Co-Winner of the 2006 Etkind Prize, Best Book by a Western Scholar on Russian Literature/Culture, European University at St. Petersburg" "One of Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles for 2002" Joseph Frank is Professor of Comparative Literature Emeritus at Princeton University and Professor of Comparative Literature and Slavic Languages and Literature Emeritus at Stanford University. Previous volumes of Dostoevsky have received the National Book Critics...

The story of a young man who commits a terrible crime, and the effect it has on his life.

Raskolnikov commits murder. He then must deal both with the police, and his own guilty conscience. Determined to overreach his humanity and assert his untrammelled individual will, Raskolnikov, an impoverished student living in the St. Petersburg of the Tsars, commits an act of murder and theft and sets into motion a story which, for its excrutiating suspense, its atmospheric vividness, and its profundity of characterization and vision, is almost...