By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

Four years ago Soviet Director Yuri Lyubimov opened an adaptation of Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment in London. Authorities in Moscow paid less attention to the rave reviews than to a London Times interview in which Lyubimov castigated Soviet censors for persistent interference with his work back home. Of 40 shows he had mounted, seven had been banned and many others had been rewritten or restaged. Said Lyubimov: "I am 65 years old, and I simply don't have the time to wait until these government officials finally arrive at an understanding of a culture that will be worthy of my native land."

Soon after, Lyubimov was warned that, like Dostoyevsky's antihero Raskolnikov, he was guilty of a "crime" and "punishment" would follow. Sure enough, he was stripped of his job at the Taganka Theater, which he had run for two decades, then his Communist Party membership, his Moscow apartment and finally, in absentia, his citizenship. After years of agitating for permission to work in the West, Lyubimov had cruelly been granted his wish. Since then he has staged plays and operas throughout Europe and in Israel, ranging from a Rigoletto in Florence, in which the heroine sang an aria while wafting through the air on a swing, to an expressionistic version of Pushkin's Little Tragedies in both Stockholm and Bologna. But his career, however thriving, involves painful artistic detachment, akin to a nuclear scientist's working through a glove box.

Last week Lyubimov, 69, made his U.S. debut at Washington's Arena Stage with ! a revised Crime and Punishment in English, a language he does not read or speak. To make the stage action conform to the vision in his head -- the standard by which Lyubimov, an auteurist and something of an autocrat, judges success -- he discussed the aims of the piece in Russian with Michael Henry Heim, an associate professor of Slavic languages and literatures at the University of California, Los Angeles, who wrote the English dialogue. Lyubimov then guided the actors through Interpreter Alexander Gelman, who is trained as a director. The process unnerved some of Arena's troupe, but the result confirms Lyubimov's reputation as one of the world's great directors. Crime and Punishment is a startling visual essay, awhirl with energy, ablaze with ideas, at once a devout invocation of Christian hope and a fervid warning against the moral "arithmetic" by which statesmen, as much as felons, balance evil deeds against happy consequences.

The show begins before the actors appear: all spectators are directed into the theater past the lip of the stage, where they witness the scene of the crime: two effigies of corpses lie sprawled in rags. Above them is a bloodstained mirror in which each onlooker may see his own face. The notion at first seems precious. But at the end, during a redemptive candle-lighting ceremony, Lyubimov brings those battered bodies back to life in the person of actors, only to have their candles, and existences, snuffed out again by another character who echoes the murderer Raskolnikov's belief in arithmetic.

Like many adaptations of classic novels, Lyubimov's is less a retelling of the story than a musing on its themes, best understood by people who know its plot well. Raskolnikov (Randle Mell) harps on the quasi-Nietzschean idea that conquerors absolve themselves of sin by the very act of conquest. He repeatedly urges himself to be a Napoleon -- which, Lyubimov acknowledges, Soviet audiences often took to mean a Stalin. These philosophical monologues, however, are kept brief. Lyubimov relies heavily on ritual and brief blackout skits that verge on surreal slapstick; he creates a milieu more than he mounts a debate. Like a cinematic montage, the story jumps from Raskolnikov to his family, his destitute neighbors, a deranged friend caught in a suicidal religious ecstasy and, occasionally, the inquisitor who seeks to extract Raskolnikov's confession. This structure is meant to evoke Raskolnikov's disconnection: only with a dead friend's daughter Sonya (Kate Fuglei) does he show tenderness.

The set is a black box, bare except for a suggestion of a tenement apartment in one corner. The most conspicuous element is a red-spattered door through which someone always seems to be bursting. Among many harsh white lights that glare down on the action, the most striking is a long thin strip at the back wall that hints of someone peering in from behind. This Crime and Punishment is equally about the social injustices of the old Russia and the arrogance of the new Soviet state, and finds a continuity between them in their lack of Christian charity and love. (Lyubimov, a lifelong believer, wore rosary beads under his clothes in the Soviet Union. Now he carries them openly and touches them often.)

Lyubimov was inspired to stage his original Moscow version, he says, by reading the essays of schoolchildren, an extract from one of which provides the coda to the show: "So, Raskolnikov was right to murder the old woman. Too bad he got caught." In Lyubimov's view, the child was echoing the amoral views of a teacher and, in turn, the state. An attentive father who travels everywhere accompanied by his second wife Katya, a Hungarian, and son Piotr, 7, Lyubimov will next mount an adaptation of Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita at the American Repertory Theater at Harvard in May and Berg's Lulu at the Lyric Opera of Chicago in November, followed by a string of European dates. He describes himself unhappily as "homeless" but says he would like to educate his son in the U.S.: "Here, schoolchildren would give a great diversity of answers in their essays about Crime and Punishment. There is more thinking for oneself."