Fiction

Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky, translated by Nicolas Pasternak Slater

Item: Crime and Punishment
Author: Slobodanka Vladiv-glover

by Slobodanka Vladiv-Glover •

May 2018, no. 401

Oxford University Press, $34.95 hb, 545 pp, 9780198709701

Fiction

Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky, translated by Nicolas Pasternak Slater

by Slobodanka Vladiv-Glover •

May 2018, no. 401

On its first appearance in Russia, Dostoevsky’s novel Crime and Punishment was the hit of the season. It was serialised throughout 1866 in the journal The Russian Messenger. Nikolai Strakhov, Dostoevsky’s first biographer, described the novel’s effect on the reading public as spectacular: ‘[A]ll that lovers of reading talked about was that novel, about which they complained because of its crushing power … so that people with strong nerves almost became ill, while people with weak nerves had to leave off reading.’ Other contemporaries testified similarly: that the novel, even for Russian readers, was not an easy read.

Slobodanka Vladiv-Glover

By this contributor

Slobodanka Vladiv-Glover is Australian representative of the International Dostoevsky Society and chief editor of The Dostoevsky Journal: A Comparative Literature Review. Her publications include Dostoevsky Studies in Australia 1956–2012 (translated into Russian), Sobranie sochinenii i pisem F. M. Dostoevskogo, St Peterburg, ‘Nauka’, 2013; The Brothers Karamazov and Repression: A phenomenological approach to Dostoevsky’s ontology, Yearbook of Bashkir University, 2014, Vol. 19, No. 3; ‘Dostoevsky, Freud and Parricide: Deconstructive Notes on the Brothers Karamazov’, New Zealand Slavonic Journal (1993). She is preparing a monograph, The Gaze of the Realists: Dickens, Dostoevsky, Flaubert, Tolstoy (Lang, NY, forthcoming 2018). She is Adjunct Associate Professor (Research), School of Languages, Literatures, Cultures and Linguistics, Monash University.