Crime and Punishment
By Fyodor Dostoevsky
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Translator's Preface
A
A
few words about Dostoevsky himself may help the English
reader to understand his work.
Dostoevsky was the son of a doctor. His parents were
very hard- working and deeply religious people, but so poor
that they lived with their five children in only two rooms.
The father and mother spent their evenings in reading aloud
to their children, generally from books of a serious character.
Though always sickly and delicate Dostoevsky came out
third in the final examination of the Petersburg school of
Engineering. There he had already begun his first work,
'Poor Folk.'
This story was published by the poet Nekrassov in his
review and was received with acclamations. The shy, unknown
youth found himself instantly something of a
celebrity. A brilliant and successful career seemed to open
before him, but those hopes were soon dashed. In 1849 he
was arrested.
Though neither by temperament nor conviction a revolutionist,
Dostoevsky was one of a little group of young men
who met together to read Fourier and Proudhon. He was accused
of 'taking part in conversations against the censorship,
of reading a letter from Byelinsky to Gogol, and of knowing
of the intention to set up a printing press.' Under Nicholas I.
Crime and Punishment
(that 'stern and just man,' as Maurice Baring calls him) this
was enough, and he was condemned to death. After eight
months' imprisonment he was with twenty-one others taken
out to the Semyonovsky Square to be shot. Writing to his
brother Mihail, Dostoevsky says: 'They snapped words over
our heads, and they made us put on the white shirts worn by
persons condemned to death. Thereupon we were bound in
threes to stakes, to suffer execution. Being the third in the
row, I concluded I had only a few minutes of life before me.
I thought of you and your dear ones and I contrived to kiss
Plestcheiev and Dourov, who were next to me, and to bid
them farewell. Suddenly the troops beat a tattoo, we were
unbound, brought back upon the scaffold, and informed
