The Sinner and the Saint By Kevin Birmingham
- Narrated by: Robert Petkoff
- Length: 15 hrs and 45 mins
- Release date: 11-16-21
The Sinner and the Saint By Kevin Birmingham AudioBook Summary
A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice * One of The East Hampton Star‘s 10 Best Books of the Year
From the New York Times best-selling author of The Most Dangerous Book, the true story behind the creation of another masterpiece of world literature, Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment.
The Sinner and the Saint is the deeply researched and immersive tale of how Dostoevsky came to write this great murder story – and why it changed the world. As a young man, Dostoevsky was a celebrated writer, but his involvement with the radical politics of his day condemned him to a long Siberian exile. There, he spent years studying the criminals that were his companions. Upon his return to St. Petersburg in the 1860s, he fought his way through gambling addiction, debilitating debt, epilepsy, the deaths of those closest to him, and literary banishment to craft an enduring classic.
The germ of Crime and Punishment came from the sensational story of Pierre François Lacenaire, a notorious murderer who charmed and outraged Paris in the 1830s. Lacenaire was a glamorous egoist who embodied the instincts that lie beneath nihilism, a Western-influenced philosophy inspiring a new generation of Russian revolutionaries. Dostoevsky began creating a Russian incarnation of Lacenaire, a character who could demonstrate the errors of radical politics and ideas. His name would be Raskolnikov.
Lacenaire shaped Raskolnikov in profound ways, but the deeper insight, as Birmingham shows, is that Raskolnikov began to merge with Dostoevsky. Dostoevsky was determined to tell a murder story from the murderer’s perspective, but his character couldn’t be a monster. No. The murderer would be chilling because he wants so desperately to be good.
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