Is this the exact text of the book?

Yes. The Short and the full audiobook read the Constance Garnett translation word for word. The captions on screen are the text itself.

Which translation is it?

Constance Garnett, 1914. It is in the public domain.

Is this a sleep story?

No. It is a classic audiobook with a tense plot (a murder and its consequences), listened to as literature.

Crime and Punishment: the first page, read aloud

Q: Are the voices real people?

No. The narrator and the characters' voices are synthetic, and the illustrations are AI-generated. Both are disclosed on YouTube.

The excerpt as a Short

Watch the Short on YouTube

What this passage does

The novel opens on a single sentence of motion: a young man leaves his garret on a hot July evening and walks "slowly, as though in hesitation". Before anything has happened, Dostoevsky has given us the heat, the city, the young man's reluctance, and the room he is leaving.

The next sentences explain the reluctance. He has avoided his landlady on the staircase, because he is in debt to her and afraid to meet her, and his garret, under the roof of a five-storied house, is "more like a cupboard than a room".

The text

On an exceptionally hot evening early in July a young man came out of the garret in which he lodged in S. Place and walked slowly, as though in hesitation, towards K. bridge. He had successfully avoided meeting his landlady on the staircase. His garret was under the roof of a high, five-storied house and was more like a cupboard than a room.

Part One, Chapter 1, Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky, translated by Constance Garnett (1914, public domain). The wording is read exactly as translated.

Listen from this moment

The excerpt starts at 0:33 in Part One of the audiobook: seven chapters, about 3 hours 52 minutes, a full cast with a narrator and a separate voice for each character.

Listen to Chapter 1 from this moment

The illustrations

A young man in his garret at night, a candle on the table.

The staircase he takes to avoid his landlady.

The hot, crowded streets of St. Petersburg.

Each stage of Part One has its own oil-painting illustration, painted locally with an AI image model in a shared night palette.

Part One, chapter by chapter

Part One on YouTube: Crime and Punishment, Part One, complete. The novel has six parts and an epilogue; the other parts follow.

Watch and listen

Short: youtube.com/shorts/5INfyKInLYI. Part One: Crime and Punishment, Part One, full audiobook.

Subscribe to @MidnightLibrary725. The narration and character voices are synthetic and the illustrations are AI-generated. The novel contains a murder and its consequences, and period language is kept as written. Found a mistake? Write to [email protected].

Listen to Part One