Although by the end of the next decade he seemed to be back on track – newly married, editing a magazine with his brother – this arrangement was cut short in 1864 by the closure of the magazine and the deaths within the space of a few months of both his wife and brother. As 1849 turned to 1850, he was en route to Omsk, south-western Siberia – following a close shave with the firing squad – where he served almost a decade as an inmate in a prison camp and as a conscripted soldier for his membership of the group of writers and intellectuals known as the Petrashevsky circle. By the end of the 1830s, he was an orphan. He was born in Moscow, in 1821, and spent much of his life on the wrong side of fate and power. Australian Broadcasting Commission Tough life inspires The late John Hurt as Raskolnikov in the BBC production of Crime and Punishment. Dostoevsky's ability to make such varied use of his experiences is a testament to his openness or resourcefulness – and also a reflection of just what a long and traumatic journey he had taken to composing his first great novel. But no great novel had sprung from the mythology of another book by the same writer in quite the way that Crime and Punishment, the story of a murder that ends in a Siberian prison, did from Dostoevsky's memoir of his own four-year stretch, Notes on the House of the Dead (1861).įrom that heaving catalogue of criminal types (killers by mischance and by profession, "brigands", "simple thieves") he drew the material for a single case study. Dostoevsky's contemporary Leo Tolstoy, after scoring a hit with Childhood, proceeded to write Boyhood and Youth. Balzac's Eugenie Grandet, which Dostoevsky himself translated into Russian, comes at about No.30 in his "Comedie humaine". Impressive sequels were fairly common when Dostoevsky got down to work in the mid-1860s. With the exception of Rogue One: A Star Wars Story and possibly Frasier, Dostoevsky's novel Crime and Punishment, published a little over 150 years ago, and now available in a pair of lucid and pleasurable – and largely similar – new translations, ranks as the most successful spin-off in the history of Western culture.
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