Fyodor Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment

This Casebook brings together seminal essays on Crime and Punishment by American, British and Russian scholars, and reflects both classical and more recent critical opinion. The novel is examined from various perspectives--literary influences, the role of the city, artistic structure, the hero's psychology and the novel's philosophical and religious connotations.

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This Casebook is a collection of interpretations of Crime and Punishment. The selection not only reflects earlier work by major critics in the field, but also more recent studies. At the same time the choice of critical approaches has been made on the basis of covering the novel's various aspects: Dostoevsky's debt to other novelists in the European tradition; his roots as a writer in the so-called "Natural School" of the 1840s with its emphasis on the theme of the city; the thematic and symbolic structure of the novel itself; the psychology of the hero; the philosophical content of the novel and its relationship to contemporary thought; the novel's religious dimension. This latter approach has long been established in western criticism, but the two essays with which the Casebook concludes are by modern Russian scholars, who examine the novel in the light of their own Orthodox tradition.