UKC

Can anyone recommend to me which Dostoevsky novel I should start with? 

I hate not finishing books and am feeling slightly daunted.

Cheers

Mark

If you want to catch him at his best then all of his great works are heavyweight in every sense of the word, although there is plenty of black humour to be enjoyed. I'd go for Crime and Punishment to start. If you're only going to read one, then I'd gird up your loins and take on The Brothers Karamazov.

I started - and finished - with The Idiot. Thematically it just didn't really chime with me. It felt very much of its time and (to me at least) didn't seem to have much resonance to a modern reader. And it doesn't half ramble on....

Crime and Punishment for sure. 

Another vote for crime and punishment

I'd also vote for Crime and Punishment. I was gripped by it, but found The Brothers Karamazov a slog and didn't finish The Idiot.

And another

Yes to Crime and Punishment. 

I remember reading it as a student at the same time that a friend was reading a different translation of it. Very different and how scholarly of me to boot   

I really enjoyed Crime and Punishment. 

Can’t remember whether Anna Katenina is his? If so I hated it. Have tried to read it three times and just lose interest. 

Anna Karenina is Tolstoy. 

Crime and punishment is definitely the lightest, so maybe the best introduction. But the Brothers Karamazov, though harder work is the one to read if you are only ever going to read one; more than twenty years after I read it there are passages still burnt into my mind amongst all the sprawling magnificence.

Crime and Punishment beats Brothers and Idiot on all fronts. For a quick taster I'd recommend The Double or Notes From Underground.

Could you point me to one? I'd like to read it. After at least twenty five years, what I still remember is that I skipped passages, even, I think, a chapter, because of (what I remember as) the spiritualism. 

The Idiot got to me after one too many a drunk person had shouted on the landing, to no discernible purpose. Or so I remember.

The passage that's burnt into my mind after twenty years is this one from the last page of Middlemarch:

"But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs."

All of them. They're easy reading and addictive......... and then you should follow up with the Tolstoy stuff which is equally good eg. War and Peace which you wont want to put down after p114.

I didn't find The Brothers Karamazov or The Idiot at all easy. Tolstoy, however, is a world apart. Apart from the big two, Resurrection was magnificent, I thought.

The one that has really stayed with me as much as anything I have read and which I recall regularly is the journey of someone to the scaffold to be hung. However close his death becomes, he still thinks of all there is to come first and somehow persuades himself that there is plenty of time left. I suppose it's meant to be a metaphor for all our lives, but, as a teacher, I am always reminded of it during the last week, then days, then hours of the summer holiday!

Yes, Anna Karenina especially is extraordinary (in particular, of course, the duck shoot). I have to admit that during the war chapters of War and Peace I just wanted to get back to the next peace bit (which were every bit as good as Anna Karenina). I found Resurrection second rate in comparison - too religious rather than just searingly human.

I know the feeling. 100 pages to go on Vanity Fair, will it ever end ...!!!
I take it you've already done https://www.waterstones.com/book/one-day-in-the-life-of-ivan-denisovich/ale... A good ruskie starter.

Thanks everyone. Crime and punishment it is I think then. Any particular translation is best?

I struggled with modern pasternak translations of dr zhivago bit tricky found the 1958 much more readable.

Yeah Tolstoy. A favourite. War and peace three times.

Thanks everyone. 

That's funny I was the opposite! Loved the war bits!!

Not sure what that says about me....although the peacetime bits were better on subsequent reads. And I didn't need my crib sheet of characters...

Thanks everyone. Crime and punishment it is I think then. Any particular translation is best?

I would go for English

Bugger! I've given up on it 3 times in the last 50 years on about page 100.