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Fyodor Dostoevsky perhaps understood the human side of crime better than any other writer the world has known. Not only did he view the subject scientifically and with great imaginative brilliance, but it was also a personal issue with him.
Having spent four years in Siberia as a convict, Dostoevsky had much opportunity and, more important, the inclination to study those wretched humans with whom he was thrown, as well as his own motives and inner drives.
Dostoevsky's father was killed by serfs and the great writer, having disliked his father intensely, unconsciously took the guilt for his father's death upon himself, inasmuch as he undoubtedly desired to kill his father at one time.
Being a man of much masochism therefore, Dostoevsky was also sadistic beneath it all and could get along with almost no one. These factors, combined with his inordinate sensitivity, discerning eye, his burning desire to comprehend the human soul, and the ability to record accurately on paper, placed Dostoevsky long before his time in understanding the tragic side of criminal behavior.
In “A Simple Affair” Dostoevsky reveals the now-established fact that sometimes during pregnancy (as often during alcoholism or periods of psychosis), a person is ruled by inner forces over which there is little or no conscious control.
Carol Safer is to be complimented, I feel, both on her translation of this piece and the fact that she herself found the, until recently, unpublished manuscript.
On October fifteenth a decision was reached in judgment of that stepmother, who, you recall, a year and a half ago, in the month of May, pushed her small stepdaughter out of a fourth story window. Then six years old, the child miraculously escaped all injury. The stepmother, Katerina Kornilova, was a twenty year old peasant,