How many people here have read Fyodor Dostoevsky ?

Honestly I find the Russian authors brilliant but ponderous. I was trying to read Crime and Punishment in college, just for pleasure. It wasn't required, but company came to my house so I played board games with them instead and gave up on Dostoevsky. I'm sort of ashamed about this. :(
 
I had a semester of Russian Literature in college. It was the longest three years of my life. The one book we really concentrated on was Crime and Punishment. It was interesting, but hard going.

One of the problems with reading Russian authors is that everybody keeps changing names. Say you have a guy named Nikolas Ivanovich Toyotasky. His mother calls him Nikita, his sisters call him Kolya and his old nurse calls him Nishki. His father calls him Nikolai. His fellow cadets in the army called him Totsky, for some reason. Periodically, he gets referred to as Count Toyotasky-Borschsky because his father is a minor prince. His best friend calls him Schastlivets because of some old joke.

You have to keep going back a hundred pages to find out who they're talking about.
 
jujube said:
I had a semester of Russian Literature in college. It was the longest three years of my life. The one book we really concentrated on was Crime and Punishment. It was interesting, but hard going.

One of the problems with reading Russian authors is that everybody keeps changing names. Say you have a guy named Nikolas Ivanovich Toyotasky. His mother calls him Nikita, his sisters call him Kolya and his old nurse calls him Nishki. His father calls him Nikolai. His fellow cadets in the army called him Totsky, for some reason. Periodically, he gets referred to as Count Toyotasky-Borschsky because his father is a minor prince. His best friend calls him Schastlivets because of some old joke.

You have to keep going back a hundred pages to find out who they're talking about.
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You said it better than me. Why in the world would you pick Russian lit?
 
chic said:
Honestly I find the Russian authors brilliant but ponderous. I was trying to read Crime and Punishment in college, just for pleasure. It wasn't required, but company came to my house so I played board games with them instead and gave up on Dostoevsky. I'm sort of ashamed about this. :(
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I had to smile at this, @chic, because I can identify. I tried to read Milton's Paradise Lost in graduate school and was completely lost. It was a confidence-dinger for sure. I would have made the same choice you did: board games!

I've never read anything by Dostoevsky—yet.
 
CooCooforCoCoPuffs said:
You said it better than me. Why in the world would you pick Russian lit?
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I was a journalism major and I thought I would learn how to write better by studying the masters. OK, you're going to laugh at me, but I also thought there would be some interesting guys taking the course....y'know, the dark, brooding type. What can I say, I was 17.
 
KSav said:
I had to smile at this, @chic, because I can identify. I tried to read Milton's Paradise Lost in graduate school and was completely lost. It was a confidence-dinger for sure. I would have made the same choice you did: board games!

I've never read anything by Dostoevsky—yet.
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If you're ever inclined Paradise regained was better. :giggle:
 
No, I've never read anything by Dostoevsky. As a kid, I just couldn't tear myself away from the Hardy Boys mystery novels. And today, I can only get in about 3 paragraphs of anything before nodding off.
 
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