Considered among the greatest fictional works of all time, Fyodor Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment was written in 1866. The novel tells the tale of Raskolnikov, his crime, imprisonment and ultimate redemption by the power of love. A near starving student when the novel opens, he is alienated by poverty and increasing emotional instability. He often finds himself contemplating the murder of an odious pawnbroker his circumstances have forced him to patronize, until one day he completes the act, killing her and her daughter in premeditated fashion with an ax he'd brought along with him. He robs the flat and flees, undetected.



Once safely away from the scene of his crime, however, Raskolnikov unaccountably buries all of the loot, taking nothing for himself. It is here where readers begin to appreciate just how distorted is the mind of Dostoevsky's famous protagonist. Raskolnikov is proud of his successful venture, yet too conflicted to profit from it. He yearns not to be arrested, yet he puts himself repeatedly in harms' way: he returns to the pawnbroker's flat, for example; he even strikes up an acquaintanceship with the magistrate in charge of the homicide investigation. His moods swing between indifference to his fate and paranoid terror. Raskolnikov examines and reexamines his actions with intensity of a man obsessed. The strikingly contradictory rationalizations he makes and the conclusions he draws are what one would expect of a psychopath. His motives and feelings are never quite clear to the reader. But Dostoevsky's portrayal of the interior workings of the mind of an antisocial monomaniac is razor sharp.

Although the point of view of this novel is almost entirely Raskonikov's, there is a large cast of characters, none of them particularly happy and almost all of them impoverished and with serious problems of their own. Overemotionalism and melodrama are characteristic of 19th Century Russian literature. The wrong audiobook narrator could get mired in bathos and easily make Raskolnikov seem ludicrous to modern listeners. Blackstone Audio's choice of the talented actor Anthony Heald is inspired. His delivery is low-key, but he is as intense and as natural a Raskolnikov as one could hope for, capturing his agony, his hubris, and his madness in all their manifestations. Although he does provide each speaker with a unique voice, Heald wisely avoids affecting a Russian accent. This helps listeners to recognize the novel's universality. Unabridged on 16 compact disks.