Abstract
Introduction In early July of 1865 in St. Petersburg, Rodion Raskolnikov killed two women, the old moneylender Alyona Ivanovna and her sister Lizaveta, and took money and valuables from their apartment. Twelve days later, he turned himself in and made a complete confession to the police. Several months after that, he went on trial. His trial went off without any great difficulties. . . . To the final questions - what could have made him commit the murder and what had induced him to commit the act of robbery - he answered very plainly and with most offensive accuracy that the cause of it all was his wretched material position, his poverty and helplessness . . . . He had made up his mind to commit the murder, however, chiefly because of his reckless and cowardly character, exasperated, moreover, by his privations and failures. 1 Raskolnikov was found guilty and sentenced to penal servitude for the term of eight years. This ordinary criminal case forms the plot 2 of Fyodor Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment (1865). One of the classics of world literature, 3 this artistic study in the philosophy and psychology of crime continues to tantalize readers with eternal questions of human existence, and continues to attract a wide range of literary and interdisciplinary scholars to different aspects of Dostoevsky's work. 4 Crime and Punishment presents a fascinating challenge to a scholar of law and literature interested in applying familiar legal concepts to well-known works of literature with a ...