Crime and Punishment
1866
Psychological fiction
Dostoevsky's 1866 novel about Rodion Raskolnikov, a poor ex-law student in St. Petersburg who murders a pawnbroker in a half-baked attempt to test his theory that a sufficiently extraordinary person is morally entitled to transgress for a greater good. The book is less a whodunit than a long, claustrophobic dive into the psychology of a man unravelling under the weight of his own act — and a reactionary's critique of the materialist, nihilist, and proto-utilitarian ideas sloshing through 1860s Russia.