The novel Crime and Punishment has received both critical and popular acclaim, and is often cited as Dostoevsky's magnum opus. To this date, Crime and Punishment remains one of the most influential and widely read novels in Russian literature.
The novel describes the fictional Rodion Raskolnikov's life, from the murder of a pawnbroker and her sister, through spiritual regeneration with the help and love of Sonya (a "hooker with a heart of gold"
, to his sentence in Siberia. Strakhov liked the novel, remarking that "Only Crime and Punishment was read in 1866" and that Dostoevsky had managed to portray a Russian person aptly and realistically. On the other hand, Grigory Eliseev of the radical magazine The Contemporary called the novel a "fantasy according to which the entire student body is accused without exception of attempting murder and robbery". Richard Louire, writing for the New York Times, praised the book and stated that the novel changed his life. In an article for the Encyclopaedia Britannica, Patricia Bauer argued that Crime and Punishment is both "a masterpiece" and "one of the finest studies of the psychopathology of guilt written in any language."
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