This work is from the award-winning translators of Crime and Punishment , Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. Dostoevsky first conceived of this book as a "novel-pamphlet" in which he intended to "say everything" about Russia"s new liberal reformers, whom he loathed - particularly the group of anti-Czarist political terrorists known as Nihilists. During the winter of 1869 this group, in the course of plotting destruction, murdered one of their own; this event and the ensuing trial became the nucleus of Dostoevsky"s unfolding masterwork.