The Sinner and the Saint: Dostoevsky and the Gentleman Murderer Who Inspired a Masterpiece

by Kevin Birmingham (Penguin, $30)

“The truth about Fyodor Dostoevsky has proved to be as mysterious as the enigmatic figures he wrote about,” said Jennifer Szalai in The New York Times. Readers who admire the great Russian novelist’s work will always be curious about the man who created them, and this new book offers fresh perspective. Author Kevin Birmingham, who previously gave similar treatment to James Joyce’s Ulysses, has now devoted a complete volume to the making of Crime and Punishment, Dostoevsky’s 1866 breakthrough. Part of the draw is Birmingham’s detailed account of the 1834 double murder that inspired the novel, a crime for which the perpetrator, a haughty poet, showed no remorse. But Dostoevsky is the more fascinating character.

“It would take a Dostoevsky novel to do full justice to Dostoevsky,” said Maureen Corrigan in NPR.org. Still, Birmingham’s novel-like account makes “a pretty exquisite consolation prize.” He argues that Crime and Punishment is revolutionary because its subject is consciousness—specifically how the student Raskolnikov persuades himself, via abstract philosophizing, to murder a stranger. And because Birmingham wants us to understand the tortured 44-year-old who wrote the tale, we hear much about Dostoevsky’s mistresses and love of gambling. We’re also with him at 28 when he’s arrested for sharing controversial political views, placed in front of a firing squad, then sent to a labor camp in frigid Siberia.

The Dostoevsky who wrote Crime and Punishment 16 years later was ill and rushing to stave off creditors, said Steven Kellman in the Los Angeles Times. As a result, “the ideas that collide in Raskolnikov’s fevered mind are never resolved.” That’s part of the novel’s power, and yet we’re lucky that Birmingham has distilled so much research into such a lucid narrative about the novel’s origins. “The tale he tells is rich, complex, and convoluted,” yet Birmingham “writes with the poise and precision his subject sometimes lacked.”