Recommendations
Books Like Crime and Punishment
What to read after Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
Fyodor Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment (1866) is one of the great psychological novels — Raskolnikov's murder, his theory about extraordinary men, and the detective Porfiry's slow circling of the truth. If you were drawn to its intensity, its moral seriousness, and its understanding of what guilt does to the mind, these novels will find you in the same territory.
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The Brothers Karamazov
by Fyodor Dostoevsky
Dostoevsky's final and greatest novel — the Karamazov brothers and the murder of their father; everything Crime and Punishment reaches toward is completed here: the psychological depth, the philosophical argument, the portrait of faith and doubt, the murder and its consequences
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The Idiot
by Fyodor Dostoevsky
Prince Myshkin, an epileptic with Christ-like goodness, entering Russian aristocratic society — Dostoevsky's portrait of a perfectly good man; the companion to Crime and Punishment in asking what morality looks like in the flesh, and what the world does to it
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Notes from Underground
by Fyodor Dostoevsky
The Underground Man, in a darkened St. Petersburg room, arguing against rationalism and the Crystal Palace — Dostoevsky's short philosophical monologue that contains the seed of everything in Crime and Punishment; under 150 pages and the best introduction to his ideas for readers who want something concentrated
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Anna Karenina
by Leo Tolstoy
Tolstoy and Dostoevsky were the two poles of the nineteenth-century Russian novel; where Dostoevsky is interior, compressed, and philosophically intense, Tolstoy is panoramic, social, and morally complex in a different register; Anna Karenina is the natural complement to Crime and Punishment for readers who want to understand the tradition
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The Trial
by Franz Kafka
Josef K. arrested without explanation — the twentieth-century heir to Dostoevsky's psychological realism; where Raskolnikov knows what he did, Josef K. does not know what he is accused of; both novels are about the experience of a mind under the pressure of an accusation it cannot escape
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Lolita
by Vladimir Nabokov
Humbert Humbert's unreliable first-person account of his obsession with Dolores Haze — the Russian tradition of the self-justifying, self-revealing narrator in a different key; where Raskolnikov tries to explain his crime and gradually reveals his guilt, Humbert tries to aestheticize his and gradually reveals his monstrousness
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The Stranger
by Albert Camus
Meursault, who kills an Arab on a beach and cannot explain why, tried and executed for an emotional failure rather than the killing itself — the existentialist response to Dostoevsky's psychological realism; Camus is explicitly writing against the tradition Crime and Punishment established, arguing that guilt is a social construct
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Demon Copperhead
by Barbara Kingsolver
A boy in Appalachian Virginia growing up in the opioid crisis — the Pulitzer Prize-winning contemporary novel that belongs to the same tradition of social realism as Dostoevsky: immersive, morally serious, deeply sympathetic to people ground down by forces larger than themselves
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