For every crime, there must be a punishment.
Rassoul's world consists of little more than a squalid rented room - strewn with books by Dostoevsky, relics from his days as a student of Russian Literature at Leningrad - and his beloved fiancée Sophia, for whom he would do anything.
So when he finds himself committing a murder, axe in hand, as if re-enacting the opening of Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, his identification with the novel's anti-hero is complete: Rassoul is Raskolnikov,...