A wonderful gift by a friend who, having to always have a different
opinion from the rest of the world, told me that this should have been my first
Dostoevsky book rather than Crime and
Punishment, or The Idiot, or The Karamazov Brothers.
It is clearly one of the best books I’ve ever read, although the fact that
I've pretty much never read any other 19th century greats means I don't have
much to compare it with. Nevertheless, it probably still needs more time to
sink in, as my opinions and recollections fluctuate between awe for the
incredibly insightful socio-political commentary, and slight boredom in the
descriptive chapters at the start and the ones portraying the lives of either
the rich or the poor people at the end of the second part and at the start of
the third one
Most of all, I find it really perplexing that not a single one of the
characters is actually likeable. Stavrogin is a spoiled little ass who only
(barely) recovers towards the end with his suicide note, Stepan Trofimovich is
just an intellectual loser (maybe I can relate, with my underutilized PhD and
forgotten Cambridge MPhil?) and you just feel sorry for him but don't really
like him, Pyotr Stepanovich is just downright scary, and Kirillov is by far the
most fascinating character for me, but talk of creepy...
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