The greatest novel ever written? Hardly the greatest novel that Dostoevsky wrote.
In many ways the 900 page length was too short as many of his ideas from previous works are represented here in somewhat shortened form and the plot is substantial. What is relatively missing are the characters who feel somewhat underdeveloped. Alyosha is not quite a Prince Mishkin, Ivan is no Stepan (and really barely present), and Dmitri is neither Raskolnikov or Rogozhin but the brothers all feel quite similar to characters in earlier works with a bit less development.
This is not to say that it’s bad as it’s deserved its place in the cannon of Russian literature. However, after reading the rest of Dostoevsky’s major works, this just feels like many of the ideas are jammed into one novel that doesn’t develop them as well as the others independently. Along with the slightly flat characters, this novel just feels a little too short to cover everything.
This completes my reading of Dostoevsky’s majors works and leaves me with “Poor Folk” and “The Gambler” among other notable works. My favorites among these remain Crime and Punishment (a nearly perfect novel with a lot of psychological insight but few ideas) and The Idiot (a novel of ideas and one of the clearest examples of Dostoevsky’s later thinking, particularly about Christianity).
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