The shock I suffered after first reading Crime and Punishment, probably the most decisive of my entire life, was largely due to the realization that what Dostoevsky did in Crime and Punishment was unlike anything I had ever witnessed, both in and out of literature, and to the realization of the immense nobility of this attempt. Doing something like that, I concluded, justifies and dignifies an existence. And what Dostoevsky and some other authors do is so different that today, more than a decade on from that first impression, I realize that time has done nothing but reinforce it. A book like Crime and Punishment will never emerge from the pen of someone who simply wants to tell a story. That is why it is so natural for me to read Joseph Frank’s lines revealing that, after a dramatic combination of circumstances, Dostoevsky wrote to his brother saying that, from that moment on, the aim of his life would be to study the meaning of life and man. Without this conscious resolution, he would never have been able to come close to what he did.