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The sinner and the saint : Dostoevsky and the gentleman murderer who inspired a masterpiece / Kevin Birmingham.

by Birmingham, Kevin, author.

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New York : Penguin Press, 2021.

Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, 1821-1881. Prestuplenie i nakazanie.

Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, 1821-1881 -- Sources.

Russian literature -- 19th century.

9781594206306 (hardcover) :

1594206309 (hardcover) :

416 pages, 8 unnumbered pages of plates : illustrations ; 25 cm

A bloody enigma -- The dead leaves -- The devil's streetlamps -- Sharp claws -- Némésis -- The Petrashevsky circle -- The execution -- Exile -- The social contract -- The dead man -- Aunt Razor -- The resurrection -- Ferocious materialism -- The birth of nihilism -- A gambling system -- An evil spirit -- An ax -- Headsmen and victims -- Diseased imagination -- The investigator -- Double-edged evidence -- Little dove -- Tiny diamond -- Buried in furs -- The wedding.

Dostoevsky's involvement with the radical politics of his day condemned him to a long Siberian exile. He spent the time studying the criminals that were his companions. Upon his return to St. Petersburg in the 1860s, the germ of Crime and Punishment came from the sensational story of Pierre François Lacenaire, a notorious murderer who charmed and outraged Paris in the 1830s. Dostoevsky began creating a Russian incarnation of Lacenaire, a character who could demonstrate the errors of radical politics and ideas. He was determined to tell a murder story from the murderer's perspective, but his character couldn't be a monster. The stenographer he hired so he could to dictate the final chapters, Anna Grigorievna, became Dostoevsky's first reader and chief critic and changed the way he wrote forever. -- adapted from jacket

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