A destitute ex-student in St. Petersburg, half-starved and feverish with a theory that extraordinary men stand above the law, murders a pawnbroker with an axe and walks out convinced he has proved something. What follows is not a manhunt but a slow siege of the conscience: a canny magistrate who never quite accuses him, a devout girl who reads him the raising of Lazarus, and a mind that cannot stop confessing to itself. Dostoevsky turned a cheap crime plot into the first great novel of the guilty interior, and the modern psychological thriller has been living in its shadow ever since.