Crime and Punishment: Book Review
Crime and Punishment: Book Review and Discussion I just finished reading Crime and Punishment, by Fyodor Dostoevsky. For reference, I read the Pevear and Volokhonsky translation, which is apparently the most accurate translation. It replicates the rough syntactic structure of the original Russian text that other translations often try to smooth over for the sake of readability, and they also apparently selected vocabulary and turns of phrases that existed in English predating the original release of the book in Russian in 1866. The result is a fairly dense and very raw read, but one that is also very engaging, if you are willing to give it a chance. You have to push through paragraphs that last four pages, perhaps even longer, and infamously long rants from characters—but I actually got used to it rather quickly, and by the end, it was like reading anything else. This novel, rather famously, involves a man (Raskolnikov) who believes he is justified in killing a corrupt pawnbroker with ...