Read Crime and Punishment by email.
You have started this book before. This time you will finish it.
A stifling Petersburg summer, a pawned watch, and an ex-student with a theory: that an extraordinary man may step over the law if his ends are great enough. Raskolnikov puts the theory to the axe, then spends the rest of Dostoevsky's 1866 masterpiece finding out what it costs — hunted less by the police than by his own mind.
Two or three minutes a day, and every installment opens with a line reminding you where you left off.
Eleven months from now, you will have read Dostoevsky.
348 installments, one an email
- First published
- 1866
- Translation
- Garnett
- Installments
- 348
- Each installment
- 2–3 min
How long it takes
- Words
- 204,493
- Reading time
- 14 hours 12 minutes
- At 5 minutes a day
- 5.5 months
- At 10 minutes a day
- 3 months
- At 20 minutes a day
- 6 weeks
At 240 words a minute, the average for adult silent reading. Use your own speed
Why read Crime and Punishment?
Crime and Punishment is the rare masterpiece that is also a thriller. The murder happens early, and you watch it happen; the suspense is everything after — the fevers, the interviews with a detective who never quite accuses, the slow discovery that a perfect theory did not survive contact with an axe. If you want to know why Dostoevsky is called the greatest psychologist in fiction, this is the book.
It was written as a serial — twelve monthly numbers in The Russian Messenger across 1866, devoured issue by issue by a public that treated each one as news. Daily email restores that shape: the chapters run on dread and cliffhanger, and a night's pause between installments does exactly what Dostoevsky's pacing wants done.
We serialize Constance Garnett's classic translation in the Standard Ebooks edition, chunked at chapter boundaries — never mid-scene — with a one-line “Previously” recap on every installment, which earns its keep in a novel where everyone has three names.
Frequently Asked Questions
How long does it take to read Crime and Punishment?
About fifteen hours straight through (204,493 words). By email, it's 348 daily installments of 2–3 minutes each — finished in about eleven and a half months, close to the year its first readers spent with it.
Is Crime and Punishment hard to read?
Easier than its reputation. Dostoevsky wrote it as a page-turner, and Garnett's prose is plain and quick. The real obstacles are pace and the Russian names — and daily installments with recaps handle both.
What about the Russian names?
Every character goes by several — Raskolnikov is also Rodion Romanovitch, and Rodya to his mother, depending on who's talking. The daily “Previously” recap keeps the cast straight, and within a couple of weeks the names read like old friends. Or suspects.
Which translation is this?
Constance Garnett's 1914 translation, in the carefully typeset Standard Ebooks edition — the translation through which generations of English readers first met Dostoevsky.
How does it arrive?
One email a day at the hour you pick, with a recap at the top so you never lose the thread. Free. Pause or unsubscribe from any installment.
Constance Garnett translation, Standard Ebooks edition, public domain. Texts from Standard Ebooks and Project Gutenberg editions. Not affiliated with either.