First serialized in twelve monthly installments during 1866 in Mikhail Katkov's literary journal The Russian Messenger before appearing as a single volume in 1867.
Follows the destitute former law student Rodion Raskolnikov, who murders an elderly pawnbroker and her half-sister Lizaveta with an axe to test his theory of 'extraordinary' men.
Confronted by the investigator Porfiry Petrovich and moved by the devotion of Sonya Marmeladova, Raskolnikov confesses and begins moral regeneration in a Siberian prison camp.