Crime and Punishment

14 Nov, 2019 890 Other literatures

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the novel written by Dostoevsky and published in 1866, in which Raskolnikov, a struggling student, justifies his murder of two women, as his future is more valuable than their lives. He thinks himself superior, above the moral laws that apply to others. The police have little evidence against him but trust him to confess, once he cannot bear the mental torture of his crime - a fate he cannot avoid, any more than he can escape from life in St Petersburg and his personal failures. The image above is from a portrait of Dostoevsky by Vasili Perov, 1872.

→ Play on BBC Sounds website

Guests

  • Sarah Hudspith 3 episodes
    Associate Professor in Russian at the University of Leeds
  • Oliver Ready No other episodes
    Lecturer in Russian at the University of Oxford, Research Fellow at St Antony's College and a translator of this novel
  • Sarah Young No other episodes
    Associate Professor in Russian at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London

Reading list

  • The New Russian Dostoevsky: Readings for the Twenty-First Century
    Carol Apollonio (ed.) (Slavica, 2010)
  • Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics
    Mikhail Bakhtin (trans. and ed. Caryl Emerson) (University of Minnesota Press, 1984) Google Books →
  • Fyodor Dostoevsky
    Robert Bird (Reaktion Books, 2012) Google Books →
  • A Dostoevskii Companion: Texts and Contexts
    Katherine Bowers, Connor Doak, Kate Holland (eds.) (Academic Studies Press, 2018) Google Books →
  • The Master of Petersburg
    J.M. Coetzee (Viking, 1994) Google Books →
  • Dostoevsky and the Riddle of the Self
    Yuri Corrigan (Northwestern University Press, 2017) Google Books →
  • Crime and Punishment
    Fyodor Dostoevsky (trans. Oliver Ready) (Penguin, 2014) Google Books →
  • The Double
    Fyodor Dostoevsky (trans. Frederick Whishaw) (CreateSpace, 2015) Google Books →
  • Notes from a Dead House
    Fyodor Dostoevsky (trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky) (Broadway Books, 2016) Google Books →
  • Notes from Underground
    Fyodor Dostoevsky (trans. Constance Garnett) (CreateSpace, 2017) Google Books →
  • Dostoevsky: The Miraculous Years, 1865-1871
    Joseph Frank (Princeton University Press, 1995) Google Books →
  • Dostoevsky: A Writer in his Time
    Joseph Frank (Princeton University Press, 2009) Google Books →
  • Dostoevsky's Quest for Form: A Study of His Philosophy of Art
    Robert Louis Jackson (Yale University Press, 1966) Google Books →
  • The Cambridge Companion to Dostoevskii
    William J. Leatherbarrow (ed.) (Cambridge University Press, 2002) Google Books →
  • Dostoevsky in Context
    Deborah A. Martinsen and Olga Maiorova (eds.) (Cambridge University Press, 2015) Google Books →
  • Dostoevsky and the Christian Tradition
    George Pattison and Diane Oenning Thompson (eds) (Cambridge University Press, 2001) Google Books →
  • Fyodor Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment: A Casebook
    Richard Peace (ed.) (Oxford University Press, 2006) Google Books →
  • Summer in Baden-Baden
    Leonid Tsypkin (trans. Roger and Angela Keys) (Hamish Hamilton, 2005) Google Books →
  • Dostoevsky: Language, Faith and Fiction
    Rowan Williams (Continuum, 2008) Google Books →

Related episodes

Programme ID: m000b6sc

Episode page: bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000b6sc

Auto-category: 891.733 (Russian literature)