The germ of Crime and Punishment came from the sensational story of Pierre Francois Lacenaire, a notorious murderer who charmed and outraged Paris in the 1830s. Dostoevsky began creating a Russian incarnation of Lacenaire, a character who could demonstrate the errors of radical politics and ideas. His name would be Raskolnikov. Lacenaire shaped Raskolnikov in profound ways, but the deeper insight, as Birmingham shows, is that Raskolnikov began to merge with Dostoevsky. Dostoevsky was determined to tell a murder story from the murderer's perspective, but his character couldn't be a monster. No. The murderer would be chilling because he wants so desperately to be good. Crime and Punishment advanced a revolution in artistic thinking. The Sinner and the Saint now gives us the thrilling and definitive story of that triumph.