In her razor-sharp analysis, Martinsen covers the novel’s narrative strategy, psychology, and ideology. Moreover, it offers invaluable suggestions for teachers seeking dynamic class discussions. Her book resonates not just with literary scholars, but also with general readers of all levels. Deborah Martinsen serves her readers a copious feast of insights into Crime and Punishment, a psychological detective novel in which tormented Raskolnikov commits two grisly murders. - Katherine Bowers, University of British Columbia, Russian Review (October 2022: Vol. Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment : A Reader’s Guide is a project Martinsen saw to completion during the final months of her life and it is truly a gift for all teachers and readers of Dostoevsky’s novel. … Martinsen, a brilliant editor and interlocutor who brought Dostoevsky scholars together in conversation, has brought these connections to bear throughout the Guide, in mentions of others’ work in the text, the work’s careful footnotes, her overview of contemporary scholarship, and, finally, its considered bibliography. This gives Dostoevsky’s reader, using the Guide, agency in their path through the text. Rather than allowing that analysis to provide all the answers, however, she focuses on the questions that it raises. Martinsen synthesizes here the wisdom and experience of decades reading, discussing, analyzing, and teaching the novel… Her insights on characterization, emotion, and the subconscious are carefully and thoughtfully embedded in her analysis of Crime and Punishment. ∽eborah Martinsen’s Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment : A Reader’s Guide is a slim but erudite volume for readers and teachers of the 1866 novel. - Carol Apollonio, Dostoevsky Studies (2022: Vol. More importantly, we are inspired by this communication from an intellectual at the top of her game and by the guidance it offers as we seek to live ethical lives in our own thinking, writing and teaching. From this book we learn fresh, bracing new ways of reading a text that we may have mistakenly thought that we fully understood. … A great teacher and scholar lives on in the ideas shares, the conversations she inspires, and the example she sets.

Accessible, insightful, deceptively slight in size, A Reader’s Guide will offer something new to readers at all stages of their Dostoevsky journey: seasoned experts, teachers, students, and curious newcomers. In this extraordinary book, distinguished scholar Deborah Martinsen draws upon a lifetime of scholarship in Dostoevsky studies, narrative theory, and ethics, as well as decades of classroom teaching, to craft a riveting, efficient introduction to Dostoevsky’s great novel.

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