Crime and Punishment

Dostoevsky often felt lonely among his contemporaries. Turgenev was skeptical of his work ("reverse commonplace"). Leo Tolstoy valued only "Notes from the House of the Dead", seeing in the novels "a serious attitude to the matter and bad form". However, "Crime and Punishment" (1866) - the first of the novels of the so-called Pentateuch of Dostoevsky - certainly stands in the same row with other great novels of the 19th century. The criminal plot, the ideological duels of the main character with the insightful investigator, drunkards, nihilists, reckless students, meek harlot-saints, scenes of St. Petersburg scorched by the summer sun - irreconcilable contrasts, cacophony and symphony of being - determine the structure of the genre of the philosophical polyphonic novel created by Dostoevsky. With extraordinary acuity he poses the key questions of human existence: the right to "blood according to conscience", faith and unbelief, sacrifice, repentance and insight. "My idealism is more real than theirs. Lord! If I were to tell you clearly what we, Russians, have experienced in the last 10 years of our spiritual development, wouldn't the realists scream that it was fantasy! And yet this is original, genuine realism! Their realism cannot explain even a hundredth of the real, actually occurring facts. And we, with our idealism, even prophesied facts. It happened" (letter to A.N. Maikov, December 11, 1868). Accompanying article by Igor SukhikhIgor Nikolaevich Sukhikh (born 1952) - Russian literary scholar, critic, Doctor of Philology, professor of the Department of History of Russian Literature at St. Petersburg State University. He worked as a visiting professor at the universities of Groningen, Helsinki, Plovdiv, and Chonan. He is the author of more than 500 works on the history of Russian literature and criticism of the 19th and 20th centuries. He is the compiler and commentator of collected works by I. Babel, M. Bulgakov, M. Zoshchenko, A. Chekhov, and the scientific director of the educational and methodological complex on literature for grades 5–11. He is a Gogol Prize winner (2005) for his book Twenty Books of the Twentieth Century.