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Crime and Punishment

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Crime and Punishment

By: Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Narrated by: David Rintoul
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About this listen

Raskolnikov, a destitute and desperate former student, wanders through the slums of St Petersburg and commits a random murder without remorse or regret. He imagines himself to be a great man, a Napoleon: acting for a higher purpose beyond conventional moral law.

But as he embarks on a dangerous game of cat and mouse with a suspicious police investigator, Raskolnikov is pursued by the growing voice of his conscience and finds the noose of his own guilt tightening around his neck. Only Sonya, a downtrodden sex worker, can offer the chance of redemption.

Dostoyevsky's penetrating novel of an intellectual whose moral compass goes haywire, and the detective who hunts him down for his terrible crime, is a stunning psychological portrait, a thriller, and a profound meditation on guilt and retribution.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky was a Russian novelist, journalist, and short-story writer who had an immense influence on 20th-century fiction. He is commonly regarded as one of the finest novelists who ever lived, penning classics that include: Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, Demons, and The Brothers Karamazov. His ideas profoundly shaped literary modernism, existentialism, and various schools of psychology, theology, and literary criticism.

Public Domain (P)2023 SNR Audio Classics World Literature
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There are several audiobooks for Crime and Punishment of varying quality. After encountering two disappointing performances that made me give up after listening for just a brief time I was happy to find that there was a version narrated by David Rintoul, whose performance of several other books I have enjoyed a lot. I really like how he pays as much attention to the third person narrative, as to the dialogue, so that the narrator seems to acquire an independent personality. He's also particularly good at achieving distinct voices in conversations between different characters of similar ages, the same gender and who have similar accents. In the other versions it was sometimes difficult to distinguish who was talking during some of the conversations between Raskolnikov and other men. The novel is compelling and interesting but it also explores many complex themes like crime, morality, injustice, religious faith and its absence, and it felt like the narrator was really engaged with the material he was reading.

Enjoyable performance that does justice to a classic

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