Crime and Punishment (The Unabridged Garnett Translation)

When you climb inside the minds of these people, good luck climbing back out. You will find a piece of yourself in every character, you will feel every moment, and you will need to learn about 435 new words. Hail Sithis, May Shadow Hide You

This is a classic for a reason. The depth of the characters is engaging and the story doesn't deviate from the main plot. The main point that Dostoevsky seems to make is that, regardless of your belief system, there are some immutable laws which cannot be broken except with intense internal suffering and conflict. Of course, if you persist in breaking those eternal laws, you eventually become desensitized to that internal conflict.

first exposure to existentialism. When one doesn't believe in god there is no concrete standard of moral behaviour, only that that is accepted by society. Raskolnikov theorises there are 2 groups of men, the ordinary (those who follow) and extraordinary (those who are not beholden to laws and in fact through action set new laws). believing himself belonging to the latter he tests this theory through intellectually justifying murder, that the bloodshed of a despicable person is all that stands in his way to a better life. upon committing the murder he realises he is no longer the same person and his intellectual rationalisation is at odds with who he is as a person, a regularly kind person. he is stricken with delirium, fever and nightmares. the conversations between him and the many interesting characters with interesting sets of beliefs is thouroughly entertaining. moral realism vs moral antirealism.