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“Birmingham writes the kind of deeply researched and deeply felt literary biographies for which clichéd rave terms ‘immersive’ and ‘reads like a novel’ were coined… superb…The Sinner and The Saint is packed with cinematic episodes … exquisite”—Maureen Corrigan, NPR’s “Fresh Air”
“Birmingham has alchemized scholarship into a magisterially immersive, novelistic account of the author’s life. The heart pounds as Dostoyevsky, zero pages written just weeks before a book deadline would force him to surrender his royalties to a creditor for nine years, having already sold off everything he could to cover his and his extended family’s debts, reluctantly resolves to try dictation. And it pounds again as he, until now doomed in love, slowly finds it with Anna Snitkina, his stenographer. These episodes are the work of a skilled storyteller. . . Exceptional. . . The Sinner and the Saint is a magnificent and fitting tribute.”—Boris Fishman, New York Times Book Review
“Tautly constructed…masterly… [Birmingham] sits as tightly on Dostoevsky’s shoulder as Dostoevsky does on Raskolnikov’s, so that we feel as if we are seeing the world — a terrifying, claustrophobic world — from their doubled perspective. . . The Sinner and the Saint is gripping, even for those who have not read Crime and Punishment for years or, indeed, have never even skimmed it.”—Kathryn Hughes, The Washington Post
“Immersive… Birmingham ably guides us. . . [A] rich, detailed narration of Dostoyevsky’s life, with all of its paradoxes and tortured ambivalences.”—Jennifer Szalai, The New York Times
“[An] inspired account of the genesis—philosophical and neurological—of Crime and Punishment … Birmingham is superb…on the intellectual environment, the vibrational stew.” —James Parker, The Atlantic
"In pungent, well-researched pages, Birmingham reveals the 'secret' background behind Dostoevsky’s great murder novel... A model of luminous exposition and literary detection, The Sinner and the Saint can be recommended to anyone interested in the dark twisted genius of [Dostoevsky].” —Ian Thomson, The Observer
"I never imagined anyone could make Dostoevsky richer--deeper--knottier--than he already was. But by revealing the secret background behind Crime and Punishment, Kevin Birmingham reveals a depth of thought and feeling that makes this most shocking of novels even more shocking yet. After all, it's easy enough to say what makes a murderer bad. It's far harder to say what makes him good."—Benjamin Moser, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Sontag: Her Life and Work
"With The Sinner and the Saint, Kevin Birmingham has scored a hat trick, delivering three biographies in one book—expertly chronicling the lives of the man who wrote Crime and Punishment and the murderer who inspired the tale, and the fascinating evolution of the novel itself. Birmingham’s ingenious braided narrative offers an inspired new reading to those who already know and love Dostoevsky’s masterpiece, and serves as an indispensable guide for first time readers.” —Megan Marshall, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Margaret Fuller: A New American Life and Elizabeth Bishop: A Miracle for Breakfast
“A page turner about turning pages, The Sinner and the Saint: Dostoevsky and the Gentleman Murderer Who Inspired A Masterpiece not only brings us back into the fevered panic of Raskolnikov as he murders an old woman, his motives a mystery even to his own sputtering mind, but also to real-life characters, most vividly a Parisian dandy (we might now call him ‘gay’), whose nihilism and thrill killings set Dostoevsky’s imagination ticking. Compulsively readable, tautly drawn, and richly researched, here is the brilliant study Dostoevsky and his staggering Crime and Punishment—filled, we now find, with intimations of him—so deserves.” —Brad Gooch, New York Times Bestselling author of Flannery: A Life of Flannery O’Connor
“Dostoevsky didn’t have any choice about misery—the Siberian exile and the epilepsy, the despair and debts and the deaths of those he loved. All that just fell upon him, and none of us would want to be him, not even for the sake of those books. But wanting to know what it was like to be him—well, that’s different, and I can’t imagine a better guide than Kevin Birmingham. Dostoevsky was both sinner and saint, and this wonderfully pungent book presents his extraordinary life in the most vivid detail imaginable. Birmingham puts you in the room when Raskolnikov brings down the axe; and he puts you there too when the novelist discovers the face of redemptive love.” —Michael Gorra, author of The Saddest Words: William Faulkner’s Civil War
“The Sinner and the Saint is a gripping murder mystery – a dazzling literary “howdunnit” that meticulously reconstructs the political ferment that inspired Dostoevsky’s most famous novel. At the heart of it all is Raskolnikov’s real-life double, a charming gentleman murderer whose trial set Parisian society ablaze.”—Alex Christofi, author of Dostoevsky in Love
Kevin Birmingham's impressive research combined with a flair for characterising the teeming intellectual debates of the day give absorbing insights into the origins of one of the world's great novels.—Sue Prideaux, author of I Am Dynamite!: A Life of Nietzsche
“Birmingham conveys in vibrant detail Dostoevsky’s literary aspirations, struggles to publish, and tumultuous world of ‘angels and demons.’ Prodigious research enlivens a vigorous reappraisal of the writer’s life.”—Kirkus starred review
“Urgent, restless and aphoristic… The result is an absorbing, thickly textured biography of Crime and Punishment that develops through fragments and shards… a considerable feat… a bold and rewarding book that will allow readers, whatever their own predispositions, to return to Dostoevsky’s first masterpiece with a renewed and more capacious perspective.” —Oliver Ready, Literary Review
“A dexterous biblio-biography about how “Crime and Punishment” came to be born. . . rich, complex. . . Birmingham writes with the poise and precision his subject sometimes lacked. . . “The Sinner and the Saint” is an admirably lucid distillation of hundreds of other texts […] it is an audacious effort.”—Los Angeles Times