Crime and Punishment [Kindle Edition]

Fyodor Dostoyevsky (Author)

Book Description

This book was converted from its physical edition to the digital format by a community of volunteers. You may find it for free on the web. Purchase of the Kindle edition includes wireless delivery.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Mired in poverty, the student Raskolnikov nevertheless thinks well of himself. Of his pawnbroker he takes a different view, and in deciding to do away with her he sets in motion his own tragic downfall. Dostoyevsky's penetrating novel of an intellectual whose moral compass goes haywire, and the detective who hunts him down for his terrible crime, is a stunning psychological portrait, a thriller and a profound meditation on guilt and retribution.

From Publishers Weekly

Dostoyevski's classic novel of murder and guilt, featuring the conflicted killer Raskolnikov and his intellectually nimble antagonist Porfiry Petrovich, is read by the well-regarded Dick Hill. The combination should make for a must-listen audiobook, but the results are disappointingly plodding. Hill overemotes much of Dostoyevski's emotionally charged dialogue, rendering a delicate series of encounters as an array of outbursts and breakdowns. Listeners might find themselves wishing that Hill would restrain himself from the pitfalls of facile emotion in favor of a straight delivery of the inherent drama and descriptive splendor of the novel In a welcome technological twist, however, Tantor includes an e-book with this audiobook (as it does with most of its classic audiobooks), giving readers multiple options for how they might prefer to encounter Dostoyevski. (Sept.)
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• File Size: 672 KB
• Print Length: 614 pages
• Page Numbers Source ISBN: 1466307455
• Simultaneous Device Usage: Unlimited
• Publisher: Public Domain Books (March 1, 2001)
• Sold by: Amazon Digital Services, Inc.
• Language: English
• ASIN: B000JQU802
• Text-to-Speech: Enabled
• X-Ray: Enabled
• Lending: Not Enabled
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #511 Free in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Free in Kindle Store)
  • #19 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Literature & Fiction > Literary Fiction

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

483 of 499 people found the following review helpful

1.0 out of 5 stars Check the Publisher of this book before you buy July 8, 2010

By Kiwi TOP 1000 REVIEWER

Crime and Punishment is one great novel. However, we have a bit of misleading marketing going on here. Make sure you're buying the version you think you're buying before you order. "Crime and Punishment" published by General Books LLC is a poor quality scanned in version. If you do the "Look Inside" thing on this book, you'll see the inside of another version of the book, NOT the one you will receive.

To give you a few quotes from the publishers website: "We created your book using OCR software ..... with up to 3,500 characters per page, even one percent can be an annoying number of typos.... After we re-typeset ... your book, the page numbers change so the old index and table of contents no longer work .... we usually remove them. .... Our OCR software can't distinguish between an illustration and a smudge or library stamp so it ignores everything except type. ..... We created your book using a robot who turned and photographed each page. Our robot is 99 percent accurate. But sometimes two pages stick together. And sometimes a page may even be missing from our copy of the book. .....". There's no manual editing whatsover.

You get the general idea. Unfortunately, books published by General Books LLC are named, seemingly intentionally, so that they have reviews associated with much better quality imprints. General Books LLC is an imprint of VDM Published (google them on Wikipedia), which is flooding Amazon with poor quality reprints and, unfortunately, many of them have the reviews associated with the original or with beter quality imprints associated with them.

Seems like it's Caveat Emptor on Amazon these days as Amazon certainly doesn't seem to be doing anything to protect it's customers from this Publisher.

137 of 140 people found the following review helpful

1.0 out of 5 stars Amazon needs to start recognizing the difference in translations March 20, 2011

By Daniel J. Moriarty

Format:Kindle Edition

This is not the version of the book I clicked on! When you look at the (paperback) edition of Crime and Punishment translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, it says right below it, "Start reading Crime and Punishment on your Kindle..." and also lists the different versions available - paperback, hardcover, etc. - and includes a Kindle Edition. But when you click on either, you get this, which is a completely different translation. Pevear and Volokhonsky have been widely praised, their translations now considered far and away the best English versions available of various classic works of Russian Literature. But Amazon lumps everything with the same title as if it were the same product. Some of the customer-uploaded images of the book's cover even say that it is the Pevear and Volokhonsky version, but it is not. It's a 1914 translation by Constance Garnett.

This is the reason people started to hate big box and online bookstores when they first started putting neighborhood bookstores out of business -- because they don't seem to care about books, just making money. But what's funny here is that they could actually charge money for the better translation, since it's new, but instead they choose to give away an inferior version and pretend it's the same thing. (They do offer the Pevear and Volokhonsky version of Demons for a price - a version easier to distinguish because the newer translation even changes the title from the less-accurate The Possessed - versions with that title are available for free.) Also, because they don't distinguish between different translations, there is no button available under the Pevear and Volokhonsky version to request that the publisher make it available for Kindle.

It's also difficult to know what version of a book is being reviewed sometimes. I'll be reading reviews on the Kindle Edition page, and the reviewer will describe the fine leather binding. This is especially frustrating now that I realize the actual content - the language - of the book I'm buying could be different from the one I read about online.

Since getting my Kindle, I've been impressed by the machine itself, but thoroughly unimpressed by Amazon's handling of content. They should focus less exclusively on getting people to buy the device, and work harder at improving the way they sell books and other content for it.

72 of 76 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars the Coulson translation can't be beat May 10, 2005

By Caraculiambro

Format:Paperback

Just a quick note to point out that if you're gonna read "Crime and Punishment" in English, the Jesse Coulson translation is indisputably the best one published to date.

Avoid at all costs the Garnett translation (as ubiquitous as it is stuffy), and try to keep away from the recently done one, the Pevear and Volokhonsky job (said to be breezy and inaccurate). The Sidney Monas translation (published in the Signet edition) is unimaginative, limp, and lifeless, lacking the oft-remarked vigor of Dostoevsky's prose. No, no: Coulson has never been outdone. Too bad he never did the Brothers K.

The only drawback with the Coulson translation, I must say, is that this guy does inject a lot of British slang, much of which can't be precisely deciphered even with the aid of a good desk dictionary. This is irritating.

However, the clarity and force of his work more than makes up for that shortcoming. He really knows how to make his characters speak differently, his descriptions are vivid and forceful, and the rhythm and dynamism of his prose can really knock you for a loop.

Admittedly, I'm not qualified to state whether all these characteristics were Dostoevsky's own and have merely been faithfully rendered into English by Coulson, or whether Coulson improved upon a stuffy and awkward original, as is perhaps suggested by the plethora of disagreeable translations. All I know is that using this translation will make your descent into Raskolinkov's world much more rewarding and memorable.

I should also note that the Coulson version is the translation employed in the Oxford World's Classics edition, which is also in print and available from Amazon. Naturally, that edition doesn't have all the critical essays the Norton edition has, but its footnotes are far more numerous and superior.

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#18 in Books > Literature & Fiction > Classics

#18 in Books > Literature & Fiction > Classics