“The best [translation of Crime and Punishment] currently available…. An especially faithful re-creation … with a coiled-spring kinetic energy…. Don’t miss it.” —The Washington Post Book World

“This fresh, new translation … provides a more exact, idiomatic, and contemporary rendition of the novel that brings Fyodor Dostoevsky’s tale achingly alive…. It succeeds beautifully.” —San Francisco Chronicle

“Reaches as close to Dostoevsky’ s Russian as is possible in English…. The original’s force and frightening immediacy is captured…. The Pevear and Volokhonsky translation will become the standard English version.” —Chicago Tribune

A desperate young man plans the perfect crime -- the murder of a despicable pawnbroker, an old women no one loves and no one will mourn. Is it not just, he reasons, for a man of genius to commit such a crime, to transgress moral law -- if it will ultimately benefit humanity? So begins one of the greatest novels ever written: a powerful psychological study, a terrifying murder mystery, a fascinating detective thriller infused with philosophical, religious and social commentary. Raskolnikov, an impoverished student living in a garret in the gloomy slums of St. Petersburg, carries out his grotesque scheme and plunges into a hell of persecution, madness and terror. Crime And Punishment takes the reader on a journey into the darkest recesses of the criminal and depraved mind, and exposes the soul of a man possessed by both good and evil ... a man who cannot escape his own conscience.