eTwinning Project School Year 2017-18

Reading Club in my school

Teacher: Amalia Chompi

Brief Biography of Fyodor Dostoevsky

One of eight children, Fyodor Dostoevsky was born to a family lineage of middle-
class businessmen and petty nobles, and his father Mikhail was a military doctor who
later secured a government position and an acquired rank of nobility. A sickly but
intelligent child, Dostoevsky was sent to a military engineering academy, which he
hated. While he was there, it is believed his father was killed by serfs on his own
plantation. His mother died of tuberculosis when Dostoevsky was a young man.

Historical Context of Crime and Punishment

Russia in the 1860s was a society in transition: the cities, particularly Petersburg and
Moscow, were filled with bankers, government clerks, and intellectuals of all stripes,
many of whom espoused political philosophies considered liberal and modeled on
similar movements in France and what would become Germany. The new tsar
Alexander II was himself a reformer, whose most notable achievement was the
freeing of the serfs in 1861, two years prior to Lincolns Emancipation Proclamation
in the United States. Once freed, serfs were no longer tied legally to the estates of
their landowners, but, like in the US, many remained in conditions of pseudo-
bondage, unable economically to establish themselves and attain middle-class
positions.

Other Books Related to Crime and Punishment

Dostoevskys particular form of realism, which emphasizes the internal,
psychological realities of his characters and focuses less on physical description of
place and event, represented one strand of a realist tradition running throughout
the 1860s. In Russia, Turgenev published Fathers and Sons in 1862, a short novel
describing the different assumptions, political opinions, and customs of young men
and their parents. A few years later, in 1869, Leo Tolstoy published War and Peace,
his sweeping take on the Napoleonic wars, the behavior of upper-class Russians, and
the nature of history itself.

Key Facts about Crime and Punishment

Full Title: Crime and Punishment (In Russian: Prestuplenie i nakazanie)
When Written: 1865-1866
Where Written: St. Petersburg
When Published: 1866 (serially, in twelve installments)
Literary Period: Realism
Genre: Psychological realism

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 eTwinning Project School Year 2017-18
Reading Club in my school
Teacher: Amalia Chompi

Setting: St. Petersburg, Russia; 1860s

Climax: Raskolnikov confesses to Sonya his murder of the pawnbroker and
Lizaveta
Antagonist: Porfiry Petrovich
Point of View: Third-person omniscient

Extra Credit for Crime and Punishment

The Problem of Translation: The Russian language is filled with prefixes, suffixes,
and forms of words that allow for numerous shades of meaning, depending on
circumstances, and which allow certain ideas to recur throughout a text. For
example, the Russian word for crime used often in the novel can be translated as
stepping overand the idea of overstepping the bounds of civilized society
becomes a fixation of Raskolnikovs throughout the work. Dostoevsky has been
translated into English many times over the past one hundred-odd years, with the
most recent version (the version used as the basis for this guide) being Richard
Pevear and Larissa Volokhonskys 1992 translation. This latter version, in the words
of the translator, attempts to capture both the roughness of Dostoevskys
language and the repetitions and echoes that are a hallmark of his prose.

References
https://www.litcharts.com/lit/crime-and-punishment#context