Crime and Punishment

Fyodor Dostoevsky

One of the most intense and disturbing novels in world literature, and one of the first to explore in depth what we would today call criminal psychology. Dostoevsky wrote it while fleeing his debts, in conditions of extreme poverty, and that urgency is felt on every page. The story takes place in Saint Petersburg, but not the Saint Petersburg of palaces and canals that appears on postcards. It is the Saint Petersburg of poor neighborhoods, of rooms that are little more than coffins, of foul-smelling staircases and taverns full of despair. A place where the summer heat makes everything more oppressive, where misery has a physical smell, and where people fall without anyone picking them up.