A poor ex-student named Rodion Raskolnikov, living in a tiny rented room in Saint Petersburg, has worked out a theory: extraordinary men are not bound by ordinary morality. To prove it to himself, he kills a hated old pawnbroker with an axe — and her innocent half-sister who walks in at the wrong moment. He spends the rest of the novel coming apart at the seams.
Dostoevsky published Crime and Punishment in 1866 in monthly installments. It is a detective novel from the criminal's side: we know who did it from chapter one, and the suspense is whether Raskolnikov can hold his nerve against Porfiry, the calm investigating magistrate who circles him for four hundred pages. Around them: a starving family, a saintly prostitute, a delusional fiancé, and the heat of a Petersburg summer.
Dostoevsky wrote in long, breathless paragraphs of rapid Russian dialogue. Storica's adaptation distils that energy to A2+ across twenty-five chapters — keeping the great set-pieces (the murder, the confession to Sonya, the cat-and-mouse interview with Porfiry) and trimming the philosophical digressions.
Dostoevsky in Russian is hard, but his structure is friendly: short chapters, dialogue-heavy scenes, moral arguments stated out loud. Storica's A2+ adaptation preserves the structure and the dialogue. You read about the murder, the interrogations, and Raskolnikov's slow collapse in vocabulary that fits a learner who has past tense and basic dialogue under their belt.
Late elementary. You can read longer chapters with light support. Past, present, and future tenses are comfortable. Idioms still trip you up.
Yes — every book in the Storica catalog is available in all seven supported languages: French, German, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Dutch, and English. Crime and Punishment was originally written in Russian, but you choose your reading language when you start.
A2+. Late elementary. You can read longer chapters with light support. Past, present, and future tenses are comfortable. Idioms still trip you up.
About one month at fifteen minutes a day. The adaptation runs to 25 short chapters — short enough to read before bed, long enough to actually move your level.
No. Storica's adaptation is the version you read. We keep the characters, plot beats, and tone of the original — and rewrite the language to fit the level. If you've read the original before, you'll recognise the story; if you haven't, the adaptation is a complete reading of the book.
Pick up where you left off. There are no streaks, no penalties, and no notifications begging you back. Day 12 is still Day 12 a week later.
Crime and Punishment is rated A2+, so we'd suggest starting with one of our A0 or A1 books first if you're brand-new to your target language. Check our shelf at /library/ — the readers there are short, gentle, and built specifically for week one.
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