Who wrote Crime and Punishment?

Dostoevsky, in 1866, and he wrote it under conditions that shaped it. He was in serious debt, had signed a ruinous contract that would have handed a publisher the rights to everything he wrote for nine years if he missed a deadline, and had to dictate a second novel simultaneously to make it - The Gambler, dictated in 26 days to a young stenographer he then married.

The novel's psychology comes from experience rather than invention. In 1849 he was arrested for belonging to a discussion circle, sentenced to death, and taken to a square to be shot - the sentence was commuted at the last moment, deliberately, after the men had been tied up and the firing squad had raised their rifles. One of them lost his mind on the spot. Dostoevsky then spent four years in a Siberian prison camp, and the only book he was allowed was the New Testament.

He was also an epileptic and a compulsive gambler, and both are in the work - the seizures given to characters and described from inside, the ruinous compulsion likewise. The murder in Crime and Punishment happens early and badly; the book is not about whether he did it but about a man who has constructed a theory permitting it and cannot survive the discovery that he is an ordinary person rather than the exception his theory required.