Dostoevsky’s "Crime and Punishment"

Deborah A. Martinsen was Associate Dean of Alumni Education and Adjunct Professor of Russian and Comparative Literature, Columbia University. Past president of the International Dostoevsky Society and former executive secretary of the North American Dostoevsky Society, Martinsen is the author of "Surprised by Shame: Dostoevsky’s Liars and Narrative Exposure" (Ohio, 2003) and co-editor of "Dostoevsky in Context" (Oxford, 2015).

“A posthumous release by one of this generation’s foremost experts on Fedor Dostoevskii, Dostoevsky’s ‘Crime and Punishment’: A Reader’s Guide by Deborah Martinsen is every bit as erudite as its author…Surprisingly, before this volume, there had been no comprehensive reader’s guide to Crime and Punishment, save for readings and analyses that appear as parts of larger works. An exquisite resource and teaching aid, every page of this guide is packed with detailed analysis, citing major research to date. It is written for general readers but also provides tips and suggestions for teaching the novel. The information presented is for the most part known to researchers, yet even the most seasoned reader of Dostoevskii will find the guide useful, whether as a refresher course or convenient reference tool.”

“The complexity of Dostoevsky’s writing is… explored in a readable and rigorous manner in Deborah Martinsen’s Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment: A Reader’s Guide. Martinsen’s book follows the plot of Crime and Punishment, revealing the themes and issues explored, the multiple echoes throughout the novel and the various perspectives open to the characters. … Martinsen’s precise analysis deftly avoids any suggestion of a simplistic resolution to the novel’s complexity.”

— Llewellyn Brown, Forum for Modern Language Studies

“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.”

“With her useful background information, deft structural overview, dazzlingly illuminating close analysis, helpful charts, and well-chosen bibliography, Deborah Martinsen has written that rarest of all books, one that can help not only students and general readers new to Dostoevsky, but also teachers and experienced Dostoevsky scholars. Her writing is clear and elegant, utterly unjargonated, yet profoundly insightful. Pedagogically sophisticated, it leaves the way open for its readers’ own interpretations.”

—William Mills Todd III, Harry Tuchman Levin Professor of Literature, Emeritus, Harvard University

“Deborah Martinsen’s elegant Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment: A Reader’s Guide has much to offer both first-time and long-time readers of this challenging and starkly relevant novel about a debt-ridden student who succumbs to the ideas in the air, ideas which resemble viruses in their ability to infect. In her spare, concise, clear prose Martinsen unpacks the complexities of the novel and vastly deepens our understanding of it. This work bristles with original insights while also making sophisticated use of a wide range of past and more current work. Her book will become the go-to companion for readers of Crime and Punishment for decades to come.”

—Robin Feuer Miller, Edytha Macy Gross Professor of Humanities, Brandeis University

“Deborah Martinsen brings to this lucid and evenhanded guide all her strengths as a Dostoevsky scholar, but especially her longstanding interest in the intricacies of shame. The reader expects Raskolnikov to feel guilt, which at least follows a well-defined script of remorse, repentance, and expiation. Instead we get a successful murderer ashamed of himself. His temptation was the power of ideas and theories; his mistake is a fraudulent pursuit of autonomy. Martinsen pulls every person in the novel into this struggle to transform Raskolnikov’s shame into responsibility and then into rapture. She asks all the right questions, but only guides the reader toward possible answers, giving nothing away.”

—Caryl Emerson, Princeton University