Crime and Punishment to coerce him to confess. The novel is divided into six parts, with an epilogue. The notion of "intrinsic duality" in "Crime and Punishment" has been commented upon, with the suggestion that there is a degree of symmetry to the book. Edward Wasiolek who has argued that Dostoevsky was a skilled craftsman, highly conscious of the formal pattern in his art, has likened the structure of "Crime and Punishment" to a "flattened X", saying: This compositional balance is achieved by means of the symmetrical distribution of certain key episodes throughout the novel's six parts. The recurrence of these episodes in
Crime and Punishment success. Although the remaining parts of the novel had still to be written, an anonymous reviewer wrote that "the novel promises to be one of the most important works of the author of "The House of the Dead"". In his memoirs, the conservative belletrist Nikolay Strakhov recalled that in Russia "Crime and Punishment" was the literary sensation of 1866. The novel soon attracted the criticism of the liberal and radical critics. G.Z. Yeliseyev sprang to the defense of the Russian student corporations, and wondered, "Has there ever been a case of a student committing murder for the sake of robbery?"