A Real-Life French Serial Killer Inspired Dostoyevsky to Write “Crime and Punishment”

History Unplugged Podcast · Feb 24, 2022 · 37m

As a young man, Fyodor Dostoevsky was a celebrated writer, but his involvement with the radical politics of his day that swept Europe during the Revolutions of the 1840s condemned him to a long Siberian exile. There, he spent years studying the criminals that were his companions. Upon his return to St. Petersburg in the 1860s, he fought his way through gambling addiction and debt, the death of those closest to him, epilepsy, and literary banishment.

The inspiration for Crime and Punishment came from the sensational true crime story of a notorious murderer who charmed and outraged Paris in the…