Crime and Punishment

The novel that invented the modern psychological thriller and the existential novel simultaneously, Crime and Punishment was serialized in a Russian literary journal in 1866 while Fyodor Dostoevsky wrote under acute personal duress — drowning in debt following his first wife's death. Its protagonist Raskolnikov murders a pawnbroker to test the theory that extraordinary people stand beyond ordinary morality, and every subsequent page traces the psychological disintegration that follows. Freud called Dostoevsky the greatest psychologist who ever lived — and the novel's precision about guilt and self-punishment makes the compliment credible. It has been translated into 170 languages and adapted into more than 40 films, a testament to the universality of its central question.