I read Crime And Punishment a long time ago and had made up my mind that I will be returning to Dostoevsky and read his two other greats The Idiot and Brothers Karamazov some time in my life.
However both of these are pretty heavy and dense reads and I never thought I will get through either - much like War and Peace. Last year I read The Idiot in one and half months. Honestly, it was difficult in the beginning and the challenge was to keep attentively reading for a long time as my life does not allow me to have long stretches of undisturbed time when I can concentrate on a serious subject, but I did get through it and it was a really good experience.
I am guilty of having kept a reading plan - how many chapters I will finish over how many days. I am not proud of it. This year my goal is to get to Brothers Karamazov and I have begun but have not gone through much of it, honestly.
I have decided to read some classics this year and this one is the first of many (fingers crossed) to come. Dosteovsky’s style is such that you cannot skim through pages, you really need to immerse yourself in the characters and their situations in life. The very poignant sense of doom from the very beginning, his very Christian sense of crime and subsequent burden on the conscience is not easy to navigate through. Some might say that men like Myshkin (The Idiot) and Alyosha (Brothers Karamazov) are from a different age and are not relevant any more, but somehow I feel that while their view of society and the way people should conduct themselves have changed, the very basic human emotions and moral conflicts are still the same.
The translation by Constance Gardner doesn’t make the job easier. Should I read a different translation? Am I just procrastinating? Only time will tell.
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