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The true crime story behind 'Crime and Punishment' on Tuesday's Access Utah

"The Sinner and the Saint" by Kevin Birmingham.
Penguin Random House

The Sinner and the Saint: Dostoevsky and the Gentleman Murderer Who Inspired a Masterpiece is the true crime story-behind-the-story of Dostoevsky’s greatest work, Crime and Punishment, and why it changed the world. November 11th marked the 200th anniversary of Dostoevsky’s birth and author Kevin Birmingham spent years researching archival material to evoke Czarist Russia at the birth of the Russian intelligentsia, along with Siberian prison camps, high-stakes trials, and gory murders and the details of Dostoevsky’s fascinating life.

Kevin Birmingham is the author of the New York Times bestseller The Most Dangerous Book, which won the PEN New England Award and the Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism. He has been named a Public Scholar by the National Endowment for the Humanities, and he received his Ph.D. in English from Harvard. His writing has appeared in Harper’s, The New York Times Book Review and the Chronicle of Higher Education.

 

Tom Williams worked as a part-time UPR announcer for a few years and joined Utah Public Radio full-time in 1996. He is a proud graduate of Uintah High School in Vernal and Utah State University (B. A. in Liberal Arts and Master of Business Administration.) He grew up in a family that regularly discussed everything from opera to religion to politics. He is interested in just about everything and loves to engage people in conversation, so you could say he has found the perfect job as host “Access Utah.” He and his wife Becky, live in Logan.