Fyodor Dostoevsky statue in Moscow (via http://bartschaneman.wordpress.com/category/russia/ ).

“The idea of the story cannot run counter to your magazine’s; on the contrary.  It is a psychological account of a crime.  A young man expelled from the university, a bourgeois by origin and living in extreme poverty, lighthearted, unstable in his ideas, has surrendered to several strange, “unfinished” ideas which are in the air.  He decided to get out of his bad position at one stroke.  He decided to kill an old woman, a Titular Councillor’s wife, who lent money on interest… “

- Dostoevsky’s draft of a letter to M.N. Katkov (an editor) in 1865 describing his ideas for a novel which would later become Crime and Punishment.