A Fever of the Soul: The Agony and Genius of Crime and Punishment

Some novels unfold like puzzles, inviting the reader to solve a crime, uncover a motive, restore order. Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, first published in 1866, is not one of those novels. There is no mystery here. The crime arrives early, and the punishment is as psychological as it is judicial. What follows is not a whodunit, but a harrowing descent into the mind of a man who thinks himself above morality—and the long, feverish unraveling of that illusion. The man is Rodion Raskolnikov, a former student scraping by in the back alleys of St. Petersburg, intellectually arrogant and increasingly…