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

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

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.

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.

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

No, too much emotion.

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

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.

You and Nabokov.

Edit: except for The Double.

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!

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.