Crime and Punishment

In Our Time: Culture

BBC

History

4.5 • 1K Ratings

🗓️ 14 November 2019

⏱️ 53 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the novel written by Dostoevsky and published in 1866, in which Raskolnikov, a struggling student, justifies his murder of two women, as his future is more valuable than their lives. He thinks himself superior, above the moral laws that apply to others. The police have little evidence against him but trust him to confess, once he cannot bear the mental torture of his crime - a fate he cannot avoid, any more than he can escape from life in St Petersburg and his personal failures.

The image above is from a portrait of Dostoevsky by Vasili Perov, 1872.

With

Sarah Hudspith Associate Professor in Russian at the University of Leeds

Oliver Ready Lecturer in Russian at the University of Oxford, Research Fellow at St Antony’s College and a translator of this novel

And

Sarah Young Associate Professor in Russian at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London

Producer: Simon Tillotson

Transcript

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0:49.6	Hello crime and punishment by Theodore Dossi Epsy was first published in 1866. It was a sensation.
0:56.2	The principal crime is Raskolnikov's, a former student.
1:00.0	We know early on that he killed an old woman, a pawnbroker, and her sister with an axe.
1:04.0	But we don't know why, and we don't know how, or if he'll be punished.
1:08.0	The novels said in St. Petersburg, a city where Dossievsky, too, had struggled and been punished for a crime and sentenced to prison
1:14.4	eight years in Siberia where he had lived alongside criminals and was now rebuilding his life as a writer.
1:19.7	We'd me to discuss crime in punishment are Sarah Young, associate professor in Russian at the School of
1:25.0	Slavonic and East European Studies University College London, Oliver Reddy, lecturer in Russian
1:30.2	at the University of Oxford, research Fellow at St. Anthony's College and
	...

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