Crime and Punishment excited much attention when it started to appear in serial form in a Russian literary journal in early 1866. Reviewing the first installment, an anonymous critic declared that "the novel promises to be one of the most important works of [Dostoyevsky]." The British scholar and translator David McDuff notes that "as the subsequent parts of the novel began to appear it acquired the status of a social and public event." A Russian critic of the time, N. N. Strakhov, later recalled that Crime and Punishment was "the only book the addicts of reading talked about."_ Strakhov noted that the novel was so powerful that people became agitated when they read it.

Some Russian critics-especially liberals and "Westernizers" -disapproved of the book because of its Implicit, controversial political viewpoint. They viewed the novel as an attack on the younger generation in Russia. One reviewer, G...