Crime and Punishment
A NOVEL IN SIX PARTS WITH EPILOGUE BY
Fyodor Dostoevsky
Translated and Annotated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky Translation copyright © 1992 ISBN: 0679405577

Foreword

“I want to do an unprecedented and eccentric thing, to write thirty printed sheets [480 printed pages] within the space of four months, forming two separate novels, of which I will write one in the morning and the other in the evening, and to finish them by a fixed deadline. Do you know, my dear Anna Vasilievna, that even now such eccentric and extraordinary things utterly delight me. I simply don't fit into the category of staid and conventional people . . .” In this typically ebullient fashion, Dostoevsky described to a friend the predicament he found himself in during the summer of 1866. He was then forty-five, and had behind him ten years of imprisonment and exile for “antigov-ernment activities,” the death of his first wife and of his closest brother Mikhail, and debts amounting to some 43,000 roubles. A year earlier he had gone abroad to escape his creditors with 175 roubles in his pocket and an agreement with an unscrupulous bookseller, F. T. Stellovsky, to produce a new novel for him by November 1, 1866, failing which (and Stellovsky hoped he would fail) all his existing and future works would become the bookseller's property. Fortunately, Dostoevsky managed to bring off this “unprecedented...thing,” though not quite in the way he envisaged. Work on one novel, which had been appearing serially in the Russian Herald since January 1866, continued to preoccupy him into the fall, and meanwhile not a word of the book for Stellovsky got written. Finally, on the advice of friends, he hired a stenographer, the young Anna Grigo-rievna Snitkin, who soon became his second wife. The Gambler, dictated to her in October, was handed to the bookseller on time, and in November he went on to finish the longer, serialized work—Crime and Punishment, the