Yet the biographer betrays no sign of panic. The creditors whom Kevin Birmingham relied on to write “ The Sinner and the Saint” - a dexterous biblio-biography about how “ Crime and Punishment” came to be born - include a formidable array of scholars as well as Dostoevsky himself. Written rapidly, in panic, to stave off his creditors, the 90-page story he planned morphed into the hefty novel that, though dismissed by Vladimir Nabokov as “so crude and so inartistic,” earned its place in the canon of world literature. “ Crime and Punishment” would live up to its author’s hyperbole, though only after a difficult and agonizing birth. “I guarantee its originality, yes, and also its power to grip the reader.” “Nothing of this kind has yet been written among us,” he told a friend. If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from, whose fees support independent bookstores.īurdened by gambling debts so onerous he feared imprisonment (again), suffering debilitating epileptic seizures and reeling from the deaths of his wife and his brother, Fyodor Dostoevsky in 1865 began what would be a masterpiece. The Sinner and the Saint: Dostoevsky and the Gentleman Murderer Who Inspired a Masterpiece
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