Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov

Crime and Punishment follows the mental anguish and moral dilemmas of Rodion Raskolnikov, an impoverished ex-student in Saint Petersburg who plans to kill an unscrupulous pawnbroker, an old woman who stores money and valuable objects in her flat. He theorises that with the money he could liberate himself from poverty and go on to perform great deeds, and seeks to convince himself that certain crimes are justifiable if they are committed in order to remove obstacles to the higher goals of 'extraordinary' men. Once the deed is done, however, he finds himself wracked with confusion, paranoia, and disgust. His theoretical justifications lose all their power as he struggles with guilt and horror and is confronted with both internal and external consequences of his deed. The Brothers Karamazov is the last novel by Russian author Fyodor Dostoevsky, and is generally considered the culmination of his life's work. The Brothers Karamazov is a passionate philosophical novel that discusses questions of God, free will, and morality. It has also been described as a theological drama dealing with problems of faith, doubt, and reason in the context of a modernizing Russia, with a plot that revolves around the subject of patricide. Dostoevsky composed much of the novel in Staraya Russa, which inspired the main setting.