<p>Crime and Punishment is a novel by the Russian author Fyodor Dostoevsky, first published in 1866. It was written after Dostoevsky's return from five years of exile in Siberia, where he was serving his sentence in camps similar to those of the infamous Soviet Gulag. Crime and Punishment deals with the mental anguish and moral dilemmas of Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikove, a poor ex-student from St. Pertersburg who designs and executes a plan to ki...