Crime and Punishment

Dostoevsky often felt lonely among his contemporaries. Turgenev ("reverse common place") belonged to his work with Skepsis. Leo Tolstoy appreciated only "Notes from the Dead House", seeing in the novels "serious attitude to business and a bad form." However, "Crime and Punishment" (1866) - the first of the novels of the so -called Pentatex of Dostoevsky - certainly stands on a par with other great novels of the 19th century. The criminal plot, the ideological fights of the main character with an insightful investigator, drunken, nihilists, reckless students, meek harlots -blows, paintings burned by the summer sun of St. Petersburg - irreconcilable contrasts, cacophony and symphony of being - determine the structure of the genre of philosophical novel created by Dostoevsky. With extraordinary acuteness, he poses key issues of human existence: the right to “blood according to conscience”, faith and unbelief, victim, repentance and insight. "My idealism is more real than their them. God! To tell you intelligently that we all, Russians, have experienced in our spiritual development in the last 10 years - but do not realists scream that this is fantasy! Meanwhile, this is a primordial, real realism! <...> With their realism - the hundredth share of real, really happened to the facts cannot be explained. And we even prophesied by our idealism. It happened "(letter to A. N. Maikov, December 11, 1868)

Igor Sukhikh"s accompanying article

Igor Nikolaevich Sukhikh (born 1952) - Russian literary critic, critic, doctor of philological sciences, professor at the Department of History of Russian Literature of St. Petersburg State University. He worked as an invited professor at the universities of Groningen, Helsinki, Plovdiv, Chonan. The author of more than 500 works on the history of Russian literature and criticism of the XIX-XX centuries. The compiler and commentator of the works of I. Babel, M. Bulgakova, M. Zoshchenko, A. Chekhov, the supervisor of the educational complex in literature for grades 5-11. Gogol Prize Laureate (2005) for the book "Twenty Books of the twentieth century"