The New Translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky; the most important since this great novel first introduced to the English- speaking world eighty years ago: 'Many consider CRIME AND PUNISHMENT Dostoevsky's finest masterpiece; of his novels, it is certainly the one that would profit most from an exact and well- informed translation, locating its 'newspaper' atmosphere in appropriate contemporary speech. This is has now received from Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, who also provide illuminating notes. They are to be congratulated on an outstanding achievement' John Bayley.

About the Author

Fyodor Dostoevsky's life was as dark and dramatic as the great novels he wrote. He was born in Moscow in 1821, the son of a former army surgeon. A short first novel brought him instant success, but his writing career was cut short by his arrest for alleged subversion against Tsar Nicholas I in 1849. Sentenced to a firing squad, dressed in a death shroud, he faced an open grave and awaited his execution when, suddenly, an order arrived commuting his sentence. He then spent four years at hard labor in a Siberian prison, where he began to suffer from epilepsy, and he only returned to St. Petersburg a fall ten years after he had left in chains. His prison experiences coupled with his conversion to a conservative and profoundly religious philosophy formed the basis for his great novels. His marriage to Anna Snitkina, following a period of destitution brought about by gambling, gave Dostoevsky the emotional stability to complete CRIME AND PUNISHMENT. THE IDIOT, THE POSSESSED, and THE BROTHERS KARAMAZOV. He died in 1881.