Crime and Punishment

This edition presents Constance Garnett's landmark 1914 translation of Fyodor Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, the story of Rodion Raskolnikov, an impoverished former student in St. Petersburg who murders a pawnbroker and her sister and is driven, over the following months, toward confession and redemption by guilt, poverty, and the quiet influence of Sonia Marmeladov. The novel opens with a translator's preface sketching Dostoevsky's own harrowing biography — his mock execution and years of Siberian exile — before unfolding across six parts and an epilogue that trace Raskolnikov's crime, his psychological unraveling, and his eventual path toward atonement in Siberia. Garnett's translation, still among the most widely read English versions of the novel more than a century after its publication, preserves Dostoevsky's long, breathless interior monologues and the distinct voices of its large cast, from Raskolnikov's feverish self-justification to Marmeladov's maudlin eloquence. This transcription reproduces Garnett's text exactly as printed, with a companion modern-English edition that renders its dated grammar and vocabulary into natural contemporary prose while preserving every quoted scripture passage, verse fragment, and foreign-language phrase word for word.