Crime and Punishment

In Our Time

BBC

History

4.6 • 9.2K Ratings

🗓️ 14 November 2019

⏱️ 53 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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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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0:00.0	BBC Sounds Music Radio Podcasts
0:04.9	Thanks for downloading this episode of In Our Time.
0:07.6	There's a reading list to go with it on our website and you can get news about our programs
0:11.5	if you follow us on Twitter at BBC In Our Time.
0:14.8	I hope you enjoyed the programs.
0:16.8	Hello, Crime and Punishment.
0:18.0	By Firdaw Dossieps, he was first published in 1866.
0:21.7	He was a sensation.
0:23.4	The principal crime is Raskolnikovs, a former student.
0:26.9	We know early on that he killed an old woman, a porn broker, and her sister with an axe.
0:31.2	But we don't know why and we don't know how or if he'll be punished.
0:35.4	The novel set in St Petersburg, a city where Dossiepsky too had struggled and been punished
0:39.6	for a crime and sentenced to prison eight years in Siberia, where he lived alongside criminals
0:44.4	and was now rebuilding his life as a writer.
0:47.1	We need to discuss crime and punishment, ah, Sarah Young, associate professor in Russian
0:51.0	at the School of Slovak and East European Studies University College London.
0:55.0	Oliver Reddy, lecturer in Russian at the University of Oxford, research fellow at St.
0:59.3	Antenna's College and translator of this novel.
1:01.9	And Sarah Hudspith, associate professor in Russian at the University of Leeds to Sarah
1:06.3	Hudspith, what was Dossiepsky's background?
1:09.8	Dostoevsky was born in Moscow and his father was a doctor at Moscow's hospital for the
1:15.7	poor.
	...

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