The Sinner and the Saint: Dostoevsky and the Gentleman Murderer Who Inspired a Masterpiece
by: Kevin Birmingham

Hardcover. NY, Penguin Press, 1st, 2021, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 416 pages. In the summer of 1865, the former exile Dostoevsky found himself trapped in a cheap hotel in Wiesbaden, unable to leave until he'd paid the bill. Having lost the last of his money at the roulette table, his debts hung heavy over his head, his epileptic seizures were worsening, and his wife and beloved brother were dead. Desperate, a story came to him, a way to write himself out of his predicament: the murderer Raskolnikov, the hot, disorienting swirl of St Petersburg, the axe, the terrible crime, and the murderer's paranoia. The book was Crime and Punishment, and from the moment it was published it was a sensation. But how did this haunting tale of guilt come to be, and why does it still hold such a sway over us all these years later? The Sinner and the Saint gives us the story of the creation of a work of literature that has bewitched readers for over a century, and of the two men so central to it: Dostoevsky himself, and Pierre Francois Lacenaire, a notorious murderer and glamorous egoist who charmed and outraged Paris in the 1830s and whose sensational story provided the germ of the novel. Clean copy.