An impoverished ex-student in St. Petersburg murders a pawnbroker to prove his theory that extraordinary men stand above moral law, then is slowly broken by guilt and paranoia until he confesses and turns toward redemption.
Books mentioned in Crime and Punishment (2)
Egyptian Nights by Alexander Pushkin: “It was in those days, that very year I believe, the 'disgraceful action of the _Age_' took place (you know, 'The Egyptian Nights,' that public reading, you remember?”
Confessions by Jean-Jacques Rousseau: “When we have finished this, we are going to begin a translation about whales, and then some of the dullest scandals out of the second part of _Les Confessions_ we have marked for translation; somebody has told Heruvimov, that Rousseau was a kind of Radishchev.”
Books that mention Crime and Punishment (15)
The Secret City by Hugh Walpole: “the Petrograd of "Poor Folk" and "Crime and Punishment"”
Why Read the Classics by Italo Calvino: “Dickens essay: composition-date comparison”
If on a Winter's Night a Traveler by Italo Calvino: “Silas Flannery's diary: "I stop before I succumb to the temptation to copy out all of Crime and Punishment," quoting its opening lines about Raskolnikov.”
An Unnecessary Woman by Rabih Alameddine: “In a silly essay on Crime and Punishment, a critic suggests that Raskolnikov is the epitome of the Russian soul.”
Hitch-22 by Christopher Hitchens: “I couldn't sleep for two nights after first reading Crime and Punishment.”
A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway: “I had Crime and Punishment on a trip when we ran out of books down at Schruns, and I couldn't read it again when we had nothing to read.”
How to Read and Why by Harold Bloom: “Crime and Punishment remains the best of all murder stories, a century and a third after its publication.”
Quichotte by Salman Rushdie: “He's a rebel in a forest memorizing Crime and Punishment because all the great texts have to be memorized to survive because all the actual books have been burned.”
Another Country by James Baldwin: “It's even been compared to Crime and Punishment—because they both have such a simple story line”
Italo Calvino by Martin McLaughlin: “Flannery sets out to obtain inspiration by transcribing the opening passage from a classic novel, such as Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment”
A Promised Land by Barack Obama: “Ever practical, she did suggest I might want to focus on my class assignments before digging into Crime and Punishment.”
Reading Like a Writer by Francine Prose: “In the second chapter of Crime and Punishment, Raskolnikov enters the tavern in which he first meets Marmeladov.”
A Brief History of Seven Killings by Marlon James: “Like that man in Crime and Punishment where Dostoyevsky says he was beyond thought”
Cogwheels by Ryūnosuke Akutagawa: “To dispel this fear I began to read Crime and Punishment. But the page I happened to open was a passage from The Brothers Karamazov, and I thought I had picked up the wrong book. [auto-translated]”
No Longer Human by Osamu Dazai: “Crime and Punishment. Dostoevsky. It grazed a corner of my mind, and I gasped: what if Dostoevsky had not treated crime and punishment as synonyms, but set them side by side as antonyms? [auto-translated]”