Fyodor Dostoyevsky - Crime and Punishment 2014 (this edition), 1866 (first complete publication). Translated and with Introduction by Oliver Ready. Penguin Classics. 702 pp.

Virginia Woolf was right: absolutely exciting to read. And a translation that totally does it justice, casting a spell, at its best rendering the long frenetic conversations in the centre of the novel between Raskalnikov and Porfiry Petrovich, dialogue which sometimes almost seem to be echoed by Basil Fawlty, alternating between humour, crazed madness, satire, farce. Remarkably, Oliver Ready wrote out the first version longhand. The ambiguity that seems central to Dosteyovsky is fully explored in the Introduction. There are other very useful additions, especially: chronology, list of characters, further reading.

Among the host of later works that seem to owe a lot to Crime and Punishment would be No Country for Old Men (gambling, chance).

other Dostoyevsky novels dating from around the publication of Crime and Punishment and some recommendations for translations:

1862 - The House of the Dead - Alex Christoffi likes Jessie Coulson translation

1864 - Notes from Underground -

1866 - Crime and Punishment - Barry Jones prefers Pevear and Volokhonsky 1992 translation but Oliver Ready wasn’t available then

1867 - The Gambler

1869 - The Idiot

1870 - The Eternal Husband

1872 - Demons

1875 - The Adolescent

1880 - The Brothers Karamazov - Barry Jones prefers Pevear and Volokhonsky 1990 translation; Alex Christoffi likes Constance Garnett translation for “Victorian style” but admits Pevear-Volokhonsky closer to the original