Dostoyevsky, the Parisian murderer, and the creation of a masterpiece, with Kevin Birmingham

In The Sinner and the Saint, Kevin Birmingham deftly unpicks the personal, societal, historical and philosophical forces that led Fyodor Dostoyeksky—isolated, indebted, beset by epileptic seizures—to take up his pen in the summer of 1865 and begin writing Crime and Punishment, and shows how it’s impossible to understand the invention of Rasklonikov without also getting to grips with the mind of a French murderer-poet who charmed and outraged Parisian society, in almost equal measure, three decades earlier—the notorious Pierre François Lacenaire. Buy The Sinner and the Saint here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/I/9780241235942/the-sinner-and-the-saint-dostoevsky-a-crime-and-its-punishment * SUBSCRIBE NOW FOR BONUS FEATURES Looking for Friends of Shakespeare and Company read Ulysses? https://podfollow.com/sandcoulysses If you want to spend even more time at Shakespeare and Company, you can now subscribe for regular bonus episodes including:Early access to complete chapters of Friends of Shakespeare and Company read UlyssesAn initiation into the world of rare book collecting;The chance to expand your reading horizons as our passionate booksellers recommend their favourite titles;Handpicked classic interviews from our archive;And an insight into what makes your favourite writers tick as they answer searching questions from our Café’s Proust questionnaire. Subscribe on Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/sandco Subscribe on Apple Podcasts here: https://podcasts.apple.com/fr/podcast/shakespeare-and-company-writers-books-and-paris/id1040121937?l=en All money raised goes to supporting “Friends of Shakespeare and Company” the bookshop’s non-profit, created to fund our noncommercial activities—from the upstairs reading library, to the writers-in-residence program, to our charitable collaborations, and our free events. * Kevin Birmingham is the author of the New York Times bestseller The Most Dangerous Book, which won the PEN New England Award and the Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism. He has been named a Public Scholar by the National Endowment for the Humanities, and he received his Ph.D. in English from Harvard. His writing has appeared in Harper’s, The New York Times Book Review, and the Chronicle of Higher Education. Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company. Buy a signed copy of his novel FEEDING TIME here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/S/9781910296684/feeding-time Listen to Alex Freiman’s Play It Gentle here: https://open.spotify.com/album/4gfkDcG32HYlXnBqI0xgQX?si=mf0Vw-kuRS-ai15aL9kLNA&dl_branch=1 Get bonus content on Patreon Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.