Crime and Punishment

An event to be celebrated, a new translation that fully captures the literary achievements of the original.So essential is Crime and Punishment (1866) to global literature and even to our understanding of roiling Russia today that Edward Snowden, while confined to the Moscow airport, was given only three books to help him absorb the culture, one being Fyodor Dostoevsky’s classic in which Raskolnikov, an impoverished student, sees himself as extraordinary and therefore free to commit crimes–even murder–in a work that best embodies the existential dilemmas of man’s instinctual will to power. Yet English translators have long struggled with excessive literalism, and no translation exists that is truly felicitous to the literary nuances of the original prose. Now, acclaimed translator Michael R. Katz addresses these challenges with new insights into the linguistic richness, the subtle tones, and the cunning humor. With its searing and unique portrayal of the labyrinthine universe of nineteenth-century St. Petersburg, this sparkling rendering of Dostoevsky’s masterpiece will be read for decades to come.