Crime and Punishment

About the Author

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.