Welcome back to Hardcore Literature, your favourite book club.

Deep dives into the greatest books ever written.

Provocative poems, evocative epics, and life-changing literary analyses.

We don't just read the great books. We live them.

Together we'll suck the marrow out of Shakespeare, Homer, Tolstoy and many more.

We'll relish the most moving art ever committed to the page and stage from every age.

Join us and me, your host, Benjamin McAvoy, on the reading adventure of a lifetime with hardcore literature.

Have you ever had a gun pointed directly into your face and thought you were going to die?

Well, Dostoevsky did.

Before he came to write Crime and Punishment, which was published in 1866, the first part was published in 1866,

and was published in installations, and was very, very very popular and helped bring up the dying magazine

it was first published into. Dostoevsky spent a long time exiled in Siberia. They bound him,

they chained his arms and legs, and they dragged him off to the hard labour camps in the freezing

cold penal colonies of Siberia,

the ends of the earth. And why did they do that? Because he was circulating some documents

that were censored at the time. Dostoevsky came to write crime and punishment, and it was his first

mature work. He came to write it through

a crystallization of everything that he'd suffered. He was an epileptic. He was a fierce gambler,

fiercely addicted to gambling. He even pawned his wife's ring in order to fund his gambling. He

was poor most of his life. he had a hard time of it.

And when you look at these masterpieces and you think, how on earth did anybody write that?

What you're actually asking is how on earth did anybody suffer enough to write that?

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