Crime and Punishment

Fyodor Dostoevsky serialised his psychodrama in a Russian literary journal in 1866, writing it while drowning in debt and grief after his first wife's death. The story of Raskolnikov — a young student who murders a pawnbroker to test his theory that extraordinary people stand above ordinary morality — invented the modern psychological novel and the existential thriller simultaneously. Freud called Dostoevsky the greatest psychologist who ever lived. The novel has been translated into 170 languages and adapted into over 40 films.