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
Kin punishment Kin punishment Kin punishment is the practice of punishing the family members of someone accused of a crime, either in place of or in addition to the perpetrator. It refers to the principle of a family sharing responsibility for a crime committed by one of its members, and is a form of collective punishment. Kin punishment has been used authoritarian states as a form of extortion or harassment. Countries that have practiced kin punishment include pre-Christian European cultures, Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, and non-Western cultures including China, Japan, and North Korea. In traditional Germanic law, the law of Germanic