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> While Crime and Punishment (1866) is frequently cited as the “quintessential Russian novel,” Dostoevsky’s final novel, The Brothers Karamazov (1880), is widely acknowledged as his greatest literary achievement.

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.

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About 25 years ago, after being absolutely blown away by Crime and Punishment, I gave The Brothers Karmazov a try, and was disappointed to find it was very soap-operaish. I really couldn't care less who was sleeping with whom or about the other petty melodrama in the book.

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.

Well-known older influential works tend to be where things that have become cliché came from.

This is why I have trouble watching Seinfeld. So many works have copied or been inspired by it that I've seen every trope or plot in other media beforehand.

Why can't Elon Musk come up with a new gag?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fSFIZleBSPI

Murderer with a heart of gold? The protagonist is a wretched coward from start to finish.

Cowards can have heart of gold too

The point of the book is that he does not have a heart of gold, and must find redemption outside of himself. The book as a whole is a window into this wretched soul and the devastation he wreaks on himself by his own actions, led by his blackened worldview.

I disagree

> 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.

You ever read Borge's "Pierre Menard Author of the Quixote"? If not you really should, short and sweet (approx 15 pages IIRC)

Quite a lot of the plot depends on Raskolnikov being sickly and fainting at inopportune moments. In modern fiction, this would be considered contrived. It's also not just a case of modern expectations being shaped by influential novels from the past because older literature avoids the same problem.

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 recommend the 1979 BBC dramatization of Crime & Punishment, starring John Hurt as Raskolnikov.

https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0078590/

Brothers Karamazov is supposedly really good, but it remains basically the only book I've started but never finished.

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.

I've tried 3 times. Haven't made it through yet.

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)

Get a good audio book version; I find that someone properly pronouncing the names helps with things like War and Peace or the Silmarillion.

Audiobooks are also great for slogs. You just keep walking, and the boring part of the book just keeps happening at you. No getting distracted and putting the book down etc.

The book is a slog, and frankly I think I'd have appreciated it much more if I read a heavily annotated edition.

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.

I think you mean "a heavily abridged edition", unless you think a lot of background info is what's missing from your experience.

No, I think what I was missing was some insight into the symbology or themes.

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.

If you liked war and peace, you should check out grossman’s life and fate, it’s WWII’s version, fantastic. And blacklisted by the soviet government because critical of it.

Definitely looking forward to reading this soon. Thanks for recommending it, friend!

I don’t understand how people don’t like War and Peace, aside from its size and the weird discursive turns he takes in the appendices. I’ve read it three times and every time it’s a page-turner. So good. But Tolstoy was an infinitely better literary artist than Dostoevsky could ever hope to be. (Tolstoy’s novella, Hadji Murad, is 100 pages of literary crystal, cleverly concealing itself from you as you look on through the transparent glass of words into the world Tolstoy points out to you, until you realize the whole thing is just Tolstoy and his astonishing talent).

But Dostoevsky had the real big heart, and I love him for it.

I don’t understand how people don’t like War and Peace

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.

War and Peace starts pretty slow. It took me a long time to get through the first 100 pages or so. Once I was into it, I couldn't put it down, but it took a while to get there.

I don’t think you can objectively say Tolstoy was a worse literary artist than Dostoyevsky.

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.

That's what they said

> But Tolstoy was an infinitely better literary artist than Dostoevsky could ever hope to be.

Right. Dostoevsky was perfect on the human element. Tolstoy on the writing.

It would have been so helpful and on topic if this and every other comment on Russian literature had stated which translation they used, or if they read the original.

I was always partial to Demons (a.k.a. The Possessed) and The Idiot.

its hard to equate “quintessential Russian novel,” with the book Crime and Punishment, here... much closer to Kafka or Camus. Crime and Punishment is worthy literature for certain, but “quintessential Russian novel,” doesn't fit..

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