It is summer in St. Petersburg. The city swelters under stifling heat. The young student Raskolnikov leaves the rented cubicle where he lives—’resembling a cupboard more than a room’—and wanders aimlessly through the streets and alleyways. Desperate and oppressed by poverty, he decides to murder an old pawnbroker and steal her money—a crime he attempts to justify by convincing himself that great men, like Caesar or Napoleon, were murderers ultimately absolved by History. But after the crime comes the punishment, and Raskolnikov is consumed by an agonising sense of guilt. The Belgian company Karyatides, an international reference in puppet and