The beginning is sooo boring. It takes over a hundred pages for them to even get to be at the same place at the same time where something even could happen. I gave up right at that point, which supposedly is when it gets good.
Tolstoy on the other hand, Anna Karenina I binged and had done in like a week (on vacation, reading a good portion of my time)
That said, excerpts from the book stand so incredibly alone. The Grand Inquisitor speech, the Father Zosima passage, Mitya's troika ride, Ilusha's funeral...
I found The Idiot a far more approachable book.
My copy of Master and Margarita has such incredible endnotes, without which I really dont think I would have appreciated it.
My Penguin Classics copy of Karamazov just has very short translation clarifications and didn't really improve my experience.
I understand why you might think i meant abridged though, since I was saying that the book is a slog but that it had great passages. I personally didnt mind the length as much as I felt I wasn't getting the most out of the "boring" parts.
But Dostoevsky had the real big heart, and I love him for it.
Easy, try mandatory-reading it in the summer when you’re around 15. I told my teacher that I will not do it and I don’t care what comes with it.
For me it’s absolutely the other way around. Dostoyevsky saw into men’s souls in a way no other writer perhaps barring Shakespeare could. Tolstoy for me is more mechanically or technically good, but Dostoyevsky was a true artist and saw through life and humanity at another level.
> But Tolstoy was an infinitely better literary artist than Dostoevsky could ever hope to be.
I also recently came back to Crime and Punishment, and found that while it has some of the greatest passages I've ever read in any book, passages that are full of keen psychological penetration and empathy for deeply flawed people, there's also a lot of corny, cliche material in it: the murderer with a heart of gold, the prostitute with a heart of gold, the consumption poor mother sacrifices everything for her chldren, etc...
These sorts of characters might not have been cliche in the 19th Century, but they certainly are today.
It's interesting how older works that were new and special at the time start looking generic and derivative decades later after inspiring a bunch of now-common tropes. Lord of the Rings if published today would be generic derivative fantasy because it has elves, dwarves (with a 'v'), halflings etc. and generally is just imitating Lord of the Rings.
I get that it's not really 'the point' and not why people love Crime and Punishment but it is a barrier to appreciating it.
I preferred & loved The Brothers Karamazov but it suffers from a similar, more justified problem: critiques on the Russian Orthodox church and prophet worship don't have much relevancy to a modern, western, atheistic audience.
I have to agree. It's unparalleled. Notes from Underground is really good too.
Speaking of Russian literature, I finally managed to finish rereading War and Peace recently after a decade+. It was long and slow, but easier this time around. I listened to The Cossacks on audiobook as well, and liked it quite a bit.