Crime and Punishment

The New Translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky

De: Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Richard Pevear - translator, Larissa Volokhonsky - translator

Narrado por: Bill Homewood

Hailed by Washington Post Book World as “the best [translation] currently available” when it was first published, this audio edition of Crime and Punishment has been newly recorded for 2025.

ONE OF TIME MAGAZINE'S 100 BEST MYSTERY AND THRILLER BOOKS OF ALL TIME

With the same suppleness, energy, and range of voices that won their translation of The Brothers Karamazov the PEN/Book-of-the-Month Club Prize, Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky offer a brilliant translation of Crime and Punishment, Dostoevsky's astounding pyschological thriller, newly revised for his bicentenniel.

In Crime and Punishment, when Raskolnikov, an impoverished student living in the St. Petersburg of the tsars, commits an act of murder and theft, he sets into motion a story that is almost unequalled in world literature for its excruciating suspense, its atmospheric vividness, and its depth of characterization and vision. Dostoevsky’s drama of sin, guilt, and redemption transforms the sordid story of an old woman’s murder into the nineteenth century’s profoundest and most compelling philosophical novel.

This audio edition of Crime and Punishment is read by award-winning narrator Bill Homewood, with audio engineering by Blake Rook. It was produced and published by Echo Point Books & Media, an independent bookseller in Brattleboro, Vermont.

©2012 Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (P)2025 Echo Point Books & Media, LLC

Better narration

I purchased the previous version of this translation by P&V, only to be disappointed by the narration. Apparently others felt the same because this audiobook has been re-released with a different narrator. I give high marks to this performance.

Outrageously bad recording, great performance, great story

The audio quality of this recording is heinous. The audio engineer behind this audiobook should be promptly sacked or at least retrained: go listen to The Count of Monte Cristo, also read by Bill Homewood, and compare the *audio quality* back to back with this book. It sounds as though it was recorded through a really nice microphone, with the speaker sat between the microphone and an AC unit, and then let a program "noise cancel" the AC away. Meanwhile, it sounds like there was no audio editor: there are multiple takes of some lines still present in the recording, sniffles and pauses left in with some shameful frequency, and wild changes in audio volume sometimes from one line to the next. I understand multiple takes happen, and I would happily put up with it for another fantastic Bill Homewood recording... But the muffled, chopped quality of the recording made this audio book almost impossible to understand on some occasions.

The worst of all is that Bill Homewood, ever the pro, is still doing the very best he can here: for those familiar with better recordings of his work, you can tell he's put his whole back into the performance, and it's a terrible shame to release it in this state.

The book is a classic, and it's as miserable in intention as in execution. Haunting, existential story that shines a light on the darkest parts of the human condition, blah blah, it's Crime and Punishment, I knew what I was here for... I just wish it'd been easier to hear.