Fyodor Dostoyevsky. It is now 150 years since the publication of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. An incredibly influential novel, Crime and Punishment also has a particularly contemporary political significance.
The plot hinges on how, one summer’s day in St Petersurg, a penniless student, Raskolnikov, murders an old woman pawnbroker. He does it partly to prove an idea that he has written about: that exceptional people, like Napoleon, can be above the law. Besides, to him the pawnbroker is a “louse” whose murder will be a net benefit to society. But during the murder, the victim’s kind and vulnerable sister walks …read more
Source: The Conversation
