This revision of the widely adopted Norton Critical Edition of Crime and Punishment incorporates material from several important works that have appeared since publication of the first edition over a decade ago. The Soviet series Literary Monuments has issued the annotated text of the novel together with Dostoevsky's notebooks as well as other materials never before published. Jessie Coulson's idiomatic and accurate translation has been retained.
All of the American, European, and Russian essays that appeared in the first edition have been retained, and six new articles have been added: Jose Ortega y Gasset joins the discussion of the artistic form of the novel; Joseph Frank discusses the intellectual; Karen Horney's and R.D. Laing's psychiatric analyses highlight the psychological interpretations of Raskolnikov's crime and the religious implications of his regeneration. Simon Karlinsky boldly assesses Dostoevsky's place in literary history, and George Gibian reveals Dostoevsky's impact on the life of another writer, the late Sylvia Plath.
About the Author
Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821–1881) was a Russian novelist, journalist, and short-story writer whose novels Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov rank among the greatest of the nineteenth century. Dostoevsky was no stranger to adversity and struggle. Born into a family of nine in October 1821, his mother died when he was sixteen, causing the family split up. After Dostoevsky was sent to a military academy with his brother, their army surgeon father was murdered by his own serfs. Even his first wife (whose traits, critics say, manifest themselves in the character of Katerina Ivanvna) died of tuberculosis. Though his first book, Poor Folk, earned him an invitation into the Natural School of Russian Literature in the 1840s, he was convicted of subversion against Tsar Nicholas I in 1849 and exiled to Siberia. By the time Crime and Punishment was published in 1866, he had returned from exile and prison, and had developed the bleak outlook that pervades the novel.
George Gibian (editor) was Goldwin Smith Professor of Russian and Comparative Literature at Cornell University. His honors include Fulbright, Guggenheim, American Philosophical Society, and Rockefeller Foundation fellowships. He was the author of The Man in the Black Coat: Russia’s Lost Literature of the Absurd, The Interval of Freedom: Russian Literature During the Thaw, and Tolstoj and Shakespeare. He was the editor of the Norton Critical Editions of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina and War and Peace, and Gogol’s Dead Souls, and of the Viking Penguin Portable Nineteenth-Century Russian Reader. Professor Gibian’s articles have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, The New Republic, the Christian Science Monitor, and Newsday, among others.
