Dostoyevsky isn't difficult

I started with Karamazov, then C&P, then the Idiot.

I loved excerpts of Karamazov (The Grand Inquisitor, Dimitry's troika ride, any passage with Grushenka) but I also found it rough to get through. I really don't think I was ultimately able to appreciate it as a whole.

C&P felt much smoother and finally I devoured The Idiot. Those novels felt like night and day compared to Karamazov.

With Karamazov, I feel like there is some subtext or context I'm missing and would have loved to have had a companion text or course to help me.

When I first Master and Margarita, it came with incredible footnotes, and rereading it again I found I sometimes recalled the footnotes more than the text. I recommended the book to a friend, but their edition didn't have the footnotes so they bounced right off it.

Anyway if anyone knows of an edition better than the Penguin Classic of BK I'm all ears.

I had the same experience, lol. I started with Crime and Punishment expecting thinly veiled philosophy where each character is a mouthpiece for one of the author's thought processes. Granted there's some of that, but I wasn't expecting such an exciting murder drama. Went into Karamazov expecting an exciting murder drama, and got the type of Russian literature I initially expected Crime and Punishment to be! Really it's a question of expectations.

Karamazov is amazing.

But if you're 600 pages in and it's a slog you might have lost the train of thought of the novel.

It is a lot to keep in your head!

Try the Ignat Avsey translation, it’s great

To give you one idea of the approach - the accurately translated title is The Karamazov Brothers. Every other translator chooses the usual way because it sounds grander or eccentric or just because that’s how others did it before them, even though it’s simply incorrect as a translation.

P&V - one of them edits without even knowing Russian, a polar opposite

Karamazov is basically YA fiction though. Find other works if you’re not into it as an older adult, it’s fine

Nabokov didnt like Dostoyevsky either, especially Karamazov https://www.nytimes.com/1981/08/23/magazine/nabokov-on-dosto...

What disginguishes Dostoevsky is his attention to detail and this unusual ability to describe someone inside and out with a voice that finds some sort of intrinsic fascination with the person no matter how dark, dingy, flawed, or just plain strange they are. It's like he withholds judgement without being clinical. His writing is peppered with these sketches, filled with insight, and it's not just a still-life - he manages to weave in these character studies with action and interaction. Most of us look out and see a lawn, boring and inert. He looks out and sees a lawn comprised of individual blades of grass, growing in soil of a specific kind, some weeds, cut some time ago, insects striving and fighting and dying and reproducing, the effects of weather and sun and shade making microclimates from which whole communities of life escape from or to....if there is anything to learn from him it is his gorgeous attention to details that we know are there but have long since ceased bothering to note.

Crime and Punishment is a bona fide detective story / crime novel, and can be enjoyed as such.

Dostoyevsky was originally published in magazines chapter by chapter, so he would end the December’s on a cliffhanger so that the readers re-subscribed

Dunno. I can't read Russian for shit (pre-kindergarten level, I'd guess), but it seems like cheating to read it in English.

> The Possessed (2010), The Idiot (2017), and Either/Or (2022)

That's like publishing Hamlet (2010), King Lear (2017), and Thus Spake Zarathustra (2022). I wonder what her thought process is in choosing these titles? And what will her next work be?

Read those first 200 pages 10x could never get past it. 300 characters with names that I’ll never remember, some woman and her son, a general or something. A guy that keeps saying “Capital!”, standing around at parties.

I’m sure it’s good but I don’t think I have it in me to try again.

You and Nabokov.

Edit: except for The Double.

A read I enjoyed in college was Ada, or Ardor by Nabokov.

No, too much emotion.

Many of the subplots have been reused for entire romance movies, and lots of the mini adventures would not be out of place in something like Its Always Sunny in Philadelphia, as odd as that sounds.

I think Nabokov definitely has a point with brothers. Ivan's portrayal and brain fever always struck me as a cop out because Dostoyevsky couldnt actually articulate what was wrong with his ideology. Of course thats kind of the point, but still it always felt cheap and clumsy to me

Don't really know what point you're trying to make here. Maybe Garnett is more westernized, but that doesn't make it more readable. IMO Garnett's not great (at least for Anna Karenina, which is all I've read by her); from what I've read P&V is more readable than Garnett.