Read Crime and Punishment in Englishwith every sentence explained

Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky was first published in 1866. In Passage you read the full text in English, marked advanced and filed under mystery and crime and thriller and suspense.

One idea, one axe, one stifling summer in St. Petersburg.

Rodion Raskolnikov has dropped out of university and now hides from his landlady in a garret no bigger than a cupboard. Hungry, proud and feverish, he nurses a dangerous theory: that a few extraordinary people have the right to step over the moral law. A greedy old pawnbroker, he tells himself, would hardly be missed.

Once he acts, the real story begins. His own mind turns against him while the people around him close in: his devoted mother and sister, the drunken clerk Marmeladov and his gentle daughter Sonya, and Porfiry Petrovich, an investigator who prefers friendly conversation to handcuffs.

Published in 1866, Crime and Punishment is the great psychological crime novel, a gripping game of cat and mouse told from inside the killer's head. Writers, philosophers and filmmakers have been answering it ever since.

Passage sets the book as a quiet, paginated reader in English. Read at your own pace, and when a sentence stops you, tap it. You get:

• a natural translation of that exact sentence,
• a short note on the grammar, in plain words,
• the key words, which you can save with the sentence they came from,
• all of it in English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Turkish or Portuguese, whichever you read best.

It's marked advanced, with richer vocabulary and longer sentences. If it feels heavy, start with an intermediate English book and come back to it. The words you save come back later in short review games, so the book keeps teaching after you close it.