Crime and Punishment was originally published serially in a literary journal in 1866 before it appeared in book form a year later in 1867. The work has clearly stood the test of time and rightfully deserves its place as one of the great masterworks of nineteenth-century Russian and world literature. Enter now, a century and a half later, Dostoevsky's work re-imagined and seen through the lens of postmodern fiction.
Welcome to Chrome and Punishment. This new work is not a parody of the original but rather a psychological mash-up, taking readers on a different journey than Dostoevsky probably ever imagined through the mind and experience of the novel's protagonist. Here, in the steampunk-inspired world of 1861 St. Petersburg, we find Raskolnikov as a young prince living on the edge of poverty after dropping out of St. Petersburg Technical University, where, like Dostoevsky himself, he was studying engineering. The prince has been disinherited by his aristocratic father and his life is in total disarray. He rails against the rise of a new class of Russians—the Chromes—who wear chrome-plated outfits to protect them from the oppressive summer heat of the city, as well as the bitter cold of winter along the canals. The Chromes cast a dark shadow across all the action in the mash-up; they're omnipresent, greedy, and all-powerful. Raskolnikov is against their rise in Russian society and sees their destructive power at work but is helpless to do anything about it.
Soon we meet another character who also claims to be Raskolnikov and acts as his double—a doppelgänger with sinister motives. Other characters also surface in the story: Dr. Hoffmann, a psychoanalyst who counsels the young prince; Raskolnikov's father and his father's new trophy wife Grushenka; Nicola Tesla, Raskolnikov's university friend who has invented the first electric bicycle; the Godfather (in Russian the Krestnii Otets) who is boss of the Petersburg crime syndicate known as the Organizatsiya and his right-hand man Vladimir Ilich Ulyanov, a young revolutionary with grand ambitions of his own; Konstantin Stanislavski, the director of the Moscow Art Theatre, now in Petersburg with his acting troupe, who recognizes the young prince's acting talents and wants the young prince to join the troupe.
All of this takes place against the backdrop of the heinous crimes and murders that ensue in this postmodern retelling of Dostoevsky's classic—which readers of the original, along with those coming to the work for the first are bound to experience in ways they haven't seen or felt before.
