Crime and Punishment

In 1865 Fyodor Dostoyevsky was broke. His brother Mikhail had died, leaving debts that Dostoyevsky took on himself, and the magazine the two of them ran had collapsed. He gambled abroad and lost. From Wiesbaden he wrote to the editor Mikhail Katkov, offering a story and asking for money in advance. Katkov sent it, and the novel began appearing in his journal The Russian Messenger through 1866, month by month, while the author was still writing it.

The book is a novel about a poor former student in St. Petersburg who murders an old pawnbroker for money, convinced that some people are allowed to break the law. What follows is not a mystery about who did it. It is a long fever of guilt.

Dostoyevsky knew the material from the inside. In 1849 he had been arrested for belonging to a circle of young men who read banned political books. He was marched out to be shot, then told at the last moment that the tsar had spared him. He spent four years in a Siberian prison camp among convicted murderers and thieves, which meant he had watched real criminals live with what they had done.

He first drafted the story as a confession spoken by the killer himself. He was unhappy with it and started again in the third person, which let him step back from his character and judge him. Halfway through the serial run he had to stop: an old contract with the publisher Stellovsky required a whole separate novel by a fixed date, or Stellovsky would own the rights to everything Dostoyevsky wrote. He hired a young stenographer, Anna Snitkina, dictated The Gambler to her in about a month, met the deadline, and married her the next year.

Readers followed the serial with real hunger, because it read like the crime stories in the newspapers but went somewhere they did not. The novel made Dostoyevsky famous again and has never gone out of print. Writers and thinkers as different as Nietzsche and Freud read him closely, and the book gave modern fiction one of its permanent tools: a narrator so close to a disturbed mind that the reader is trapped inside it. Its Petersburg, hot and stinking and crowded, is still the city readers picture when they think of that name.