Summary
Kevin Birmingham: The Sinner and the Saint
The Sinner and the Saint is a meticulously researched and captivating story of how Dostoevsky wrote Crime and Punishment, an epic story of murder – and why it changed the world. And it all starts with the sensational story of Lasenar, the infamous murderer who enchanted and enraged Paris in the thirties of the nineteenth century, embodying the ideals of nihilism, which would become the philosophy of the Russian revolutionaries of that time. According to Lasenar, Dostoevsky shaped Raskolnikov in the deepest possible ways, but Birmingham shows that Dostoevsky began to merge with Raskolnikov, but he did not want his literary hero to be a monster. Not. The killer will be gruesome because he so desperately wanted to be a good man.
The novel Crime and Punishment launched a revolution in artistic thought and began the most fruitful phase of Dostoevsky's career. Sinner and Saint now gives us exciting details, the genesis and story of that triumph.
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