A desperate young man plans the perfect crime—the murder of a despicable pawnbroker, an old woman no one loves and no one will mourn. Is it not just, he reasons, for a man of genius to commit such a crime, to transgress moral law—if it will ultimately benefit humanity? So begins Crime and Punishment, one of the greatest novels ever written.

Raskolnikov, an impoverished student living in a garret in the gloomy slums of St. Petersburg, carries out his grotesque scheme and plunges into a hell of persecution, madness and terror. Crime and Punishment takes the reader on a journey into the darkest recesses of the criminal and depraved mind, and exposes the soul of a man possessed by both good and evil . . . a man who cannot escape his own conscience.