Raskolnikov — Crime and Punishment

Fyodor Dostoevsky's Raskolnikov — a young St. Petersburg student who murders a pawnbroker and her sister to test his theory that extraordinary people are above conventional morality — is the greatest psychological study in world literature of guilt, rationalism, and the consequences of intellectual arrogance. His interior monologue, as he suffers and reasons and suffers again, invented techniques of psychological fiction that Freud himself acknowledged as anticipating psychoanalysis.