With Selected excerpts from The Notebooks for Crime and Punishment .Introduction and Notes by Dr Keith Carabine, University of Kent atCanterbury. Crime and Punishment is one of the greatest and most readablenovels ever written. From the beginning we are locked into the frenziedconsciousness of Raskolnikov who, against his better instincts, isinexorably drawn to commit a brutal double murder. From that moment on, weshare his conflicting feelings of self-loathing and pride, of contempt forand need of others, and of terrible despair and hope of redemption: and,in a remarkable transformation of the detective novel, we follow hisagonised efforts to probe and confront both his own motives for, and theconsequences of, his crime.The result is a tragic novel built out of aseries of supremely dramatic scenes that illuminate the eternal conflictsat the heart of human existence: most especially our desire forself-expression and self-fulfilment, as against the constraints ofmorality and human laws; and our agonised awareness of the world's harshinjustices and of our own mortality, as against the mysteries of divinejustice and immortality.