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Crime and Punishment: A Reader’s Guide focuses on narrative strategy, psychology, and ideology. Martinsen demonstrates how Dostoevsky first plunges the reader into Raskolnikov’s fevered brain, creating sympathy for him, and she explains why most readers root for him to get away from the scene of the crime. Dostoevsky subsequently provides outsider perspectives on Raskolnikov’s thinking, effecting a conversion in reader sympathy. By examining the multiple justifications for murder Raskolnikov gives as he confesses to Sonya, Dostoevsky debunks rationality-based theories. Finally, the question of why Raskolnikov and others, including the reader, focus on the murder of the pawnbroker and forget the unintended murder of Lizaveta reveals a narrative strategy based on shame and guilt.
“The Guide constitutes the kind of addition to the classroom — or to your personal library — which makes readers wonder how they ever taught the novel before this vade-mecum existed. I would hope that this short and useful book will fulfil Martinsen’s life’s work by encouraging readers everywhere to explore the book, and lecturers in any branch of Literary or Comparative Studies to welcome Crime and Punishment back onto the curriculum.”
—Muireann Maguire, Modern Language Review
“In this extraordinary book, distinguished scholar Deborah Martinsen draws upon a lifetime of scholarship in Dostoevsky studies, narrative theory, and ethics, as well as decades of classroom teaching, to craft a riveting, efficient introduction to Dostoevsky’s great novel. Accessible, insightful, deceptively slight in size, A Reader’s Guide will offer something new to readers at all stages of their Dostoevsky journey: seasoned experts, teachers, students, and curious newcomers. … A great teacher and scholar lives on in the ideas [Martinsen] shares, the conversations she inspires, and the example she sets. From this book we learn fresh, bracing new ways of reading a text that we may have mistakenly thought that we fully understood. More importantly, we are inspired by this communication from an intellectual at the top of her game and by the guidance it offers as we seek to live ethical lives in our own thinking, writing and teaching.”
— Carol Apollonio, Dostoevsky Studies (2022: Vol. 25)
“Deborah Martinsen’s Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment: A Reader’s Guide is a slim but erudite volume for readers and teachers of the 1866 novel. Martinsen synthesizes here the wisdom and experience of decades reading, discussing, analyzing, and teaching the novel… Her insights on characterization, emotion, and the subconscious are carefully and thoughtfully embedded in her analysis of Crime and Punishment. Rather than allowing that analysis to provide all the answers, however, she focuses on the questions that it raises. This gives Dostoevsky’s reader, using the Guide, agency in their path through the text. … Martinsen, a brilliant editor and interlocutor who brought Dostoevsky scholars together in conversation, has brought these connections to bear throughout the Guide, in mentions of others’ work in the text, the work’s careful footnotes, her overview of contemporary scholarship, and, finally, its considered bibliography. Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment: A Reader’s Guide is a project Martinsen saw to completion during the final months of her life and it is truly a gift for all teachers and readers of Dostoevsky’s novel.”
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Historical Introduction
2. Overview
3. Parts One and Two: Getting Away with Murder
4. Parts Three to Five: In and Out of Raskolnikov’s Mind
5. Part Six: Last Meetings and Epilogue
Appendix 1: Illustrations and Maps
Appendix 2: Crime and Punishment Chronology
Appendix 3: Contemporary Critical Reactions
Appendix 4: Chronology of Dostoevsky’s Life
Bibliography