A law student in Petersburg has run out of money and stopped going to lectures. He lies in a rented cupboard under the roof working out an idea: that the ordinary rules are written for ordinary men, and that a certain kind of man is entitled to step across them if what waits on the other side is large enough. He decides to find out which kind he is. He takes an axe to a pawnbroker who lends against other people's last belongings, and a second woman walks in while he is still standing there.
The murder takes two pages. The rest of the book is what it costs him. Not the law, which is slow and has nothing on him. The theory. It holds up perfectly right until the moment he has to live inside it, and then it starts eating him from the middle out, and every room he walks into gets smaller.
What follows is not a manhunt. Porfiry Petrovich, the examining magistrate, never produces a scrap of evidence. He talks. He circles. He tells Raskolnikov exactly what he thinks and then lets him go home, because he understands that a man carrying this will bring it to him eventually, and that anything the magistrate does in the meantime only gives him something to push against. It is one of the great interrogations in fiction and almost nothing happens in it.
Around the two of them is the city: Marmeladov, who has drunk his family into the street and can describe exactly what he is doing to them while he does it; Sonia, who sells herself to keep them fed and reads him the raising of Lazarus off a book she can barely hold; Svidrigailov, who lives the theory without flinching and shows what it actually looks like from inside, which is the most frightening thing in the novel. Dostoevsky wrote it under contract and under pressure, serialized through 1866 with his debts closing in and a second publisher holding a clause that would have taken the rights to everything he ever wrote. He had spent four years at hard labour in Siberia. He knew the men he was describing and he had been in the room with them.
This is the Civil Savage Society edition of the Constance Garnett translation, newly typeset in a 6 by 9 inch US Trade format, 566 pages. Complete in six parts with the Epilogue, all thirty-nine chapters, nothing abridged. Dropped: the public domain apparatus and the modern introductions that explain the ending to you before you have read the first sentence.
Paperback: perfect bound on cream stock. A workhorse copy, meant to be carried, dog-eared, and marked up.
Hardcover: casewrap edition built for the shelf and the long haul.
Print editions are produced on demand. Nothing warehoused, never out of print.
