What a fantastic book!! I made me reread Crime and Punishment, that's a plus too! Glad to know more about the background of the novel and Dostoyevsky himself.

I really enjoyed this exposition to the writing of Crime and Punishment. I did not know the background on Dostoevsky’s life nor the murder that inspired the book. Highly recommend for any C&P fans!

This was an entertaining and informative read. I found myself sharing what I learned from this book with those around me. I recommend it to fans of good and highly readable non-fiction.

What an absolutely captivating piece of scholarly analysis! Dr. Birmingham delves into the world of Dostoevsky to provide a new angle on the author’s masterwork. The research is impeccable and the result is fascinating! A must for anyone who actually completed their assigned reading of the Russian masters!

I was so excited for Kevin Birmingham's The Sinner and the Saint that I read Crime and Punishment in anticipation of the release of The Sinner and the Saint. I am so glad I did because it really helped inform my understand of the history of Crime and Punishment. Kevin Birmingham's niche of writing about the history surrounding great works of literature is a lot of fun and fills something of a void. For fan's of history, literature, and imagined circumstances (a la Maggie O'Farrell, T.C. Boyle, Colm Toibin).

The way Kevin Birmingham combines Dostoevsky with Crime and Punishment is one of brilliance. This book is definitely not something that I would normally read but I was not disappointed. This book was well researched and written.

The cross-cutting here between the life of Dostoevesky and that of the murderer of Lacenaire who inspired Crime and Punishment is an excellent approach to biography, and especially the biography of the writing of a novel.

Perhaps what is most valuable about The Sinner and the Saint, in addition to the author’s infectious enthusiasm for his subject, is his explanation of how Crime and Punishment came to be written and published and how it was received by critics and the reading public.

This book is a very interesting read for anyone who loves Dostoyevsky and Crime and Punishment. Birmingham’s book tells the story of the real life murder that inspired Dostoyevsky’s story, how the author came to know of it, and the life events at that time that shaped the author and caused the novel to take the form that it did. Highly recommended to all literature lovers. Thanks to NetGalley for the digital review copy.

My familiarity with Dostoevsky goes back to high school (decades ago). I went through a period of interest in the "classics" and remember reading The Brothers Karamazov and Crime and Punishment. I have only a slight remembrance of the latter but thought it would be interesting to learn a bit more about what influenced this Russian writer that is so often referred to. Bottom line: history and politics influenced him. And those are two subjects for which I honestly have little interest. I hate admitting that fact and I really, really wanted to like this book.

Readers with a working knowledge of Russia's history and political landscape, will probably find the book a fascinating read. I slogged through about forty percent of the book and then I just decided to cut my losses. The overall impression of his life is one of desperation, misguided fervor, and hubris. When Doestoevsky's writing was first "discovered" in his early 20's, I think that set him on the road to ruin as much was made of his intellect at the time. I couldn't help thinking about all the child celebrities who have much made of them only to allow fame and fortune to utterly ruin them for a normal, productive life.

The first half of the book was like watching a rising star hit its zenith and then slowly descend to its death. The hopelessness of the political scene paralleled the hopelessness of Dostoevsky's life. A man who seemed to live aimlessly, constantly running up debts, borrowing from Paul to pay Peter and never quite learning from his mistakes.

The book seemed to be meticulously researched, so I do not fault the author for my lack of enjoyment. He did a marvelous job of allowing me to experience some of the madness that characterized Dostoevsky's life as I muddled through the pages. While this did not resonate with me, I do feel like it is a worthy work for anyone wanting a greater understanding of what shaped the life of Dostoevsky. I would gladly recommend to anyone who is pursuing Russian Literature or some other Russian studies. This is not a light, or casual read but rather something that will take time to absorb and process. For those who have the tenacity to complete it, I am sure their efforts will be rewarded.

Disclaimer: I received a free digital copy of The Sinner and the Saint free from NetGalley for the purpose of review. No other compensation was received. Opinions expressed are entirely my own.

A superb work of literary biography and scholarship, a fascinating read from beginning to end. It explores Dostoevsky’s life and writing through the lens of Crime and Punishment from the first ideas to its execution. Birmingham dramatizes much of Dostoevsky’s life to good effect making this most tortured of souls come alive on the page. There’s lots of original research here too, not least into the French murderer Lacenaire (1803-1836) who was executed for his crimes and clearly made an impression on Dostoevsky: another interesting strand to an already compelling book. Birmingham has also studied all the drafts, notes, constant changes and revisions Dostoevsky made for his famous novel which again adds to our appreciation and understanding of it. A must read for anyone interested in Dostoevsky or in Russian literature in general.

[The Sinner and the Saint: Dostoevsky and the Gentleman Murderer Who Inspired a Masterpiece byKevin Birmingham|5997421] delves into the writing of Fyodor Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment and The Gambler primarily with some focus on his lesser-known writings after his exile to Siberia by Tsar Alexander I.
Dostoevsky stayed true to the maxim of writing about what you know, and in his case, what he experienced. The Sinner and the Saint is both a chronological biography of Dostoevsky and a historical account of Russia under Tsar Alexander I and II and includes a brief overview of times before Alexander I. I've never read any of Dostoevsky but am now planning on for 2022 to read Crime and Punishment and the shorter novel, The Gambler thanks to Birmingham's The Saint and the Sinner's excellent primer on Dostoevsky and his works.

This book was a great peek into Dostoevsky’s life as he wrote one of my favorite high school English books, Crime and Punishment. I did not know or remember a lot about Dostoevsky so it was fun to revisit the book. It was also rather interesting to learn that he was inspired by Lacenaire’s infamous murder for his own novel. Overall, I enjoyed the book, even though I felt like it could have been edited down quite a bit.

Although I read Crime and Punishment in high school, I had no idea there was a real crime behind the seminal tale. The Sinner and the Saint tells an utterly unputdownable story of the story that Dostoyevsky could not put down. Birmingham brings so much vigor to people and situations that existed so long ago, it feels like the events of the book happened only yesterday. I can't wait to reread Crime and Punishment now.

Dostoevsky lived a difficult and fascinating life with enough tragedy and suffering to rival some of his greatest fictional creations. His remarkable talent as a writer launched him into literary renown at an early age with the publication of his novella, Poor Folk. But the next period of his life was marked by critical failure, debt, and subversive political activity that culminated in being brought before a firing squad and then exiled to a Siberian prison camp.

The Sinner and the Saint by Kevin Birmingham is a new book that chronicles the genesis of Crime and Punishment, the novel which heralded the start of Dowtoevsky’s most prodigious period of creative outpouring. It’s also the story of Pierre-François Lacenaire, an aspiring French poet whose notoriously cold-blooded murder of a man and his elderly mother for their money in 1834 gave Dostoevsky some of the details of his most well known plot (and also inspired Hugo, Stendhal, Balzac, Baudelaire, and Flaubert.)

The narrative is divided into three sections. Part I offers a few glimpses into Dostoevsky’s early life, then details his subsequent foray into fiction writing and fateful involvement with the Petrashevsky Circle, a group of literary progressives who promoted ideas of social reform that the tsar found intolerably offensive. Part II chronicles the four years he spent in Siberia as well as his subsequent return to St. Petersburg and his process of reestablishing himself as a writer in a rapidly changing Russia. Part III concerns the reactions to Crime and Punishment once it began to appear in print and provides a skillful dissection of why this novel had the impact it did and still continues to today.

Interspersed throughout are chapters about Larcenaire and the trail of criminal schemes he concocted before he was apprehended and brought to justice by the French police, although I would have gotten just as much out of this book if all the information on Lacenaire was condensed and kept to an isolated, shorter section in the beginning. That Dostoevsky was familiar with Lacenaire’s crimes and took inspiration from them to craft the psychology of his protagonist is clear, but this book is compelling enough just as a biographical work on Dostoevsky without the interweaving of details of Lacenaire’s life.

You definitely don’t need to have read Crime and Punishment to appreciate this book. In fact, I would recommend this as a great introduction for anyone who hasn’t read Dostoevsky but is interested in why his contributions to literature are held in such high regard. It’s also a gripping and fascinating history of the sociopolitical climate of Russia during the mid-19th century.

Genre fiction has often been sneered at, generally by the same people who hold "classics" as being the epitome of literary achievement. Who can forget the interview where Martin Amis implied he would only stoop so low to write children's literature if he had a "brain injury." This kind of elitism and snobbishness has always existed in the arts. However what the many who tightly cling to this sense of superiority do not realise is that it is only very recently that realism has crept into literature - think about Homer, Beowulf, Shakespeare with his Wyrd Sisters, Titania and Oberon. Human beings have always enjoyed a good does of the mysterious, miraculous, mythological and the unexplainable in our stories.

For those that read the types of books I cover in this blog, there is one book that while being called a classic is utterly and undeniably crime fiction. Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, which has set a standard for not just crime writing but also novel writing in turn influencing Kafka, Joyce and Woolf among many others. Dostoyevsky was part of the Golden Age of Russian Literature and is seen as a forerunner of many new movements. But for all it's accolades and the other similar weighty tomes it will sit next to on a book shelf, at the centre of this book lies a crime, it's motivation and it's consequences, which also places it quite firmly as a piece of genre fiction.

In The Sinner and The Saint, Kevin Birmingham tracks Dostoyevsky's writing of Crime and Punishment, and how his life shaped his thinking in the novel. While most Russian writers were writers because they came from nobility and could afford to be, Dostoyevsky was slightly different. He was born on the edge of nobility, and spent most of his life trying to pay off debts that could easily land him in jail because of a barbaric attitude to debt in that time. Indeed one does get the impression that if someone had taken young Dostoyevsky in hand and taught him to have more than a toddlers grasp of budgeting then it could be likely that his life would have been much easier, he may well have lived longer, and been able to be happier. It is a good a morality tale for not raising man-babies incapable of looking after themselves as any.

One of the most fascinating periods of Dostoyevsky's dramatic life was his death sentence, which was commuted at the last minute to several years in Siberia. There he mixed with other political prisoners, but also criminals, murderers, rapists - the kind of people who someone like Dostoyevsky would have been unlikely to live side-by-side with in his cushioned but precarious life in St Petersburg. It is obvious that this, and his exposure to the many different political ideologies which floated around the middle classes of Russia was highly influential on writing Crime and Punishment, but Birmingham deftly weaves another tale into this story, that of Pierre Francois Lacenaire.

Lacenaire was a celebrity criminal, a kind of proto-Bundy who after his arrest for murder, became infamous across Europe for not only his crimes, but his personality. He was good looking, educated, wrote poetry from his cell, mused on philosophies of the time, and was most of all, charming and flamboyant - the opposite of the prevailing idea of a criminal at the time. The public could not get enough of him. Like Dostoyevsky's protagonist Roskolinkov, Lancenaire killed for money, but got little, and killed people from the underbelly of society - giving them both the illusion of some kind of moral superiority or deep philosophical knowledge.

Birmingham parallels the writing of Crime and Punishment with Lancenaire's life, crimes and death to emphasise it's influence of the work. But while both Dostoyevsky and Lancenair both die (I hope it's not too much of a spoiler to know they are both not still alive), the book they have midwifed into the world still exists. The Sinner and the Saint seams to end on a cliff edge, just as Crime and Punishment is destined itself to start it's life, and what will it do? How will it fare in the world without the people who both donated their DNA, even if one was an unaware of what they inspired?</p>

It felt to me like Birmingham finished this book just a little too soon, and more would have been advisable after the death of the author, to turn it into the biography of a book. To trace how it interacted with cultures and readers around the world and through time. What did Crime and Punishment do to readers, what did readers do back? In the Sinner And The Saint, we have a prequal, because while the stories of Dostoyevsky and Lacenaire are interesting they created something bigger than themselves, and at the moment, Birmingham has only given us a glimps of this.

This nonfiction book tells in parallel form the stories of Dostoevsky's life and how he created the "life" of Raskolnikov, the main character in Crime and Punishment. Both stories are fascinating. I had no idea Dostoevsky went through so much while still a young man. Dostoevsky's primary focus in the creation of Crime and Punishment was not to just retell the true murder story of an unrepentant Frenchman: he wanted to write the book in such a way that the reader would understand what went on in the mind of the killer. Dostoevsky went to particular pains to avoid writing the story of a monster that no human could identify with even to a small degree.
This book is terrific for readers who enjoy Dostoevsky's books, want to follow the creation of a classic novel, want to understand the psychology of a murderer, or who will simply enjoy a beautifully written book that will grip them.
Absolutely five stars.

I don’t think Dostoyevsky needed to go too far away to look for an inspiration to write Crime and Punishment, as the world around him was enough to feed him with ideas left and right. But I found it extremely exciting that I have something common with him: passion for true crime. Apparently America’s favorite pastime was Dostoyevsky’s favorite activity besides writing what’s know to be world classics and dreaming of good days for Mother Russia.

This book could easily pass for an enjoyable history book. You get to to understand Russia during Dostoyevsky’s time, his life, his struggles, his thought process, his relationship and also this once noble, now wanna be evil French axe murderer. The bits and pieces from these stories shaped up one of the greatest stories of all times.

If you are not so into nonfiction like me but wouldn’t let it pass if you find a good one (especially about books and true crime), well, you got yourself a winner… because this is absolutely great 2 in 1.

My thanks to NetGalley and the publisher Penguin Group The Penguin Press for an advanced copy of this new literary biography.

Inspiration can come from many places. For the Russian author Fyodor Dostoevsky, inspiration came to him by reading of a French murderer who had become a celebrity in Paris, for both neutrality to his act of murder, and his gentlemanly ways. Kevin Birmingham has in The Sinner and the Saint: Dostoevsky and the Gentleman Murderer Who Inspired a Masterpiece written both a dual biography or writer and villain, a true crime study and a history of the times and events that help create the novel Crime and Punishment.

The book, as I stated, covers many things. Politics, philosophy, turmoil and confusion in Russia and Europe, plus the state of literature and the lives of our two protagonists. Alternating chapters follow the author Dostoevsky from his days in military school, and the murderer Pierre François Lacenaire starting at his entry to the criminal underworld. The similarities of both men, a love of gambling and losing fortunes, believing they were both destined for great things, exile for one, prison for another is interesting to read. The book does a very good job of following both men as they live their lives.

The writing is absorbing and though it covers a number of different subjects does not get lost nor bogged down. The true crime aspect is not sensationalized, but written with enough detail to understand the barbarity of the crime, and why it must have been such a thunderbolt of inspiration for a Russian author in need of a novel. Both characters are fleshed out and interesting though how Lacenaire became the toast of Paris does escape me. I'm not sure how acting like James Dean in court with some cool poems would make me look past the axe murder of pawnbroker and his mother, but there numerous true crime podcasts out there, so it must be just me.

A very different kind of literary study, as much a biography of a novel as it is these two men. Much happens, but I never found it dull or confusing. This is the second study I have read by Mr. Birmingham, and I am excited to see what author or novel he might cover next.

I was intrigued by the idea of The Sinner and the Saint, this biography/literary criticism/history/true crime book, and found it enjoyable and rewarding reading.

As a biography of Dostoyevsky, I was astonished by his life. He was plagued by poverty and ill health and epilepsy, and cheated by his publishers. He became involved with radical thinkers. He was arrested by the tsar for treason, nearly executed, and sent to Siberia where he studied criminals up close, eliciting them to share their grisly stories. The description of life in Siberia is very affecting. Russia had no prisons, and convict labor in Siberian mines fueled massive wealth.

After four years in prison, Dostoyevsky was required to serve in the Army. He and his brother then tried to run magazines, which failed. He tried gambling in a desperate bid for solvency. The tsar kept tight control with censorship of newspapers, magazines, and books, and yet Dostoyevsky wrote some of the greatest novels ever written.

Russia was in turmoil, reform movements and radicalism spurring the tsar to authoritarianism. One philosophy was to believe in nothing–nilhism. When a man who tried to assassinate the tsar was asked by the tsar what he wanted, he replied “nothing.”

The French murderer Lacenaire, unapologetic and enjoying his notoriety, inspired Dostoyevsky’s character of Raskolnikov. Lacenaire’s wealthy family lost their fortune. He was expelled from schools and hated his jobs, and took up gambling while trying to write. He adopted a philosophy of egoism and decided to become an outlaw. He had no remorse for the murders he committed and met his execution with impersonal interest.

The murderer fascinated Dostoyevsky. He decided to write a murder story from the viewpoint of the murderer. A man who kills for no reason, for nothing. He would not be a monster, he would be someone we could understand.

I enjoyed the book on many levels: learning about Russia under the tsar and the philosophical and political ideas that arose in 19th c Russia; as a biography of Dostoyevsky; for its discussion of Russian literature; and as a vehicle to understand Dostoyevsky’s masterpiece, Crime and Punishment.

I received a free egalley from the publisher though NetGalley. My review is fair and unbiased.