Crime and Punishment

Начало книги

“I want to do an unprecedented and eccentric thing, to write thirty printed sheets [480 printed pages] within the space of four months, forming two separate novels, of which I will write one in the morning and the other in the evening, and to finish them by a fixed deadline. Do you know, my dear Anna Vasilievna, that even now such eccentric and extraordinary things utterly delight me. I simply don't fit into the category of staid and conventional people . . .” In this typically ebullient fashion, Dostoevsky described to a friend the predicament he found himself in during the summer of 1866. He was then forty-five, and had behind him ten years of imprisonment and exile for “antigov-ernment activities,” the death of his first wife and of his closest brother Mikhail, and debts amounting to some 43,000 roubles. A year earlier he had gone abroad to escape his creditors with 175 roubles in his pocket and an agreement with an unscrupulous bookseller, F. T. Stellovsky, to produce a new novel for him by November 1, 1866, failing which (and Stellovsky hoped he would fail) all his existing and future works would become the bookseller's property.

Читать дальше →