There is a copy of Crime and Punishment on a bedside table somewhere in your house. It has a bookmark in it, roughly ninety pages deep, and it has not moved since a January you can no longer date precisely. You have not given up on it. You simply haven’t picked it up. There is a difference, and you have been observing it for two years.
This happens to nearly everyone, and it is rarely the book’s fault.
First, the thing nobody warns you about
The usual culprit is not the philosophy, or the length, or the general air of Russian doom. It is the names.
Every character has three, and everybody uses a different one. Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikov is Raskolnikov to the narrator, Rodya to his sister, and Rodenka to his mother, and by page forty you have quietly concluded that you missed the introduction of a fourth man. You did not. There is no fourth man. There has only ever been Rodya.
Two minutes of preparation fixes this permanently. The middle name is a patronymic: Romanovich means son of Roman, Alexandrovna means daughter of Alexander. Anyone being formal or respectful uses the first two names together. Anyone who loves the character uses a squashed, affectionate version of the first. That is the entire system. Write the four principals on the inside cover if it helps; nobody is watching you read.
The other thing worth knowing is that you are allowed to choose where you begin. The internet will tell you to start with Crime and Punishment, largely because that is the one the internet has heard of. It is a fine answer. It is not the only one, and for some people it is the wrong one.
The Gambler
If you want to find out whether you like him
In 1865, broke and behind on everything, Dostoevsky signed a contract with the publisher Fyodor Stellovsky that reads like a plot from one of his own novels. Deliver a new work by 1 November 1866 — or Stellovsky acquires the rights to everything Dostoevsky writes for the following nine years.
By the start of October 1866 he had almost nothing to show for it. He was, at the time, still serialising Crime and Punishment. So he hired a young stenographer named Anna Grigoryevna Snitkina, dictated the whole of The Gambler to her in twenty-six days, and delivered it just inside the deadline. Stellovsky, sensing the outcome, had made himself unavailable; Dostoevsky had to lodge the manuscript with a police official and obtain a receipt for it. He married Anna in February.
The novel is about a man who cannot stop gambling. Dostoevsky, at that point in his life, could not stop gambling. It is short, it moves, and it is very funny about the particular humiliation of wanting something badly. If you don’t get on with it, you have lost a weekend rather than a season.
Crime and Punishment
If you want the famous one, and you’re ready
It deserves the reputation, and it is a great deal more readable than the reputation suggests. The murder happens early. Everything after it is essentially a police procedural conducted inside the head of the guilty man, which is a much better structure than “important Russian novel” leads you to expect.
Porfiry Petrovich, the examining magistrate, is the reason to keep going. He never actually accuses Raskolnikov of anything. He simply turns up, is pleasant, talks a great deal about nothing in particular, and is completely unbearable to be in a room with. Nobody has written a better interrogation, and there is barely an interrogation in it.
One instruction, and it matters: skip the introduction. Modern editions front-load a scholarly essay that will give away the ending somewhere around page xii, in the serene tone of a man who assumes you have read the book four times already. Read it afterwards, when it becomes genuinely interesting.
Notes from Underground
If you want the whole man in a hundred pages
The shortest route to the centre of Dostoevsky, and the one most likely to make you dislike him.
The first half is not a story. It is a man in a basement flat addressing you directly, explaining at length why he is cleverer than you and why this has ruined his life. He is spiteful, he knows he is spiteful, and he takes an appalling pleasure in telling you so. “I am a sick man… I am a spiteful man. I am an unattractive man. I believe my liver is diseased.” That is the opening. He does not improve.
The second half is a story, and it is worse: a dinner he has invited himself to, and an encounter afterwards that he manages to poison entirely out of wounded pride.
Read it anyway. Everything he spent the next twenty years writing is already here in miniature, including the idea the app tends to hand people on a Thursday — that consciousness is something suffering produces, rather than something it interrupts. It runs to under a hundred and fifty pages. Two evenings, and you will not forget it.
The three to save
The Brothers Karamazov is his last novel and, on most days, the best thing in the language. It is also eight hundred pages, four brothers, a murdered father, and one chapter — “The Grand Inquisitor” — that people have written entire books about. Come to it when you already trust him. It repays the trust in full.
The Idiot is where “beauty will save the world” comes from, though not in the way the tote bags suggest: the line is reported second-hand by a dying consumptive teenager who is needling the man who said it. The book is about what happens to a genuinely good man in ordinary company, and it is more distressing than any of the murders.
Demons is the political one. It is extremely funny until, quite abruptly, it isn’t.
“Above all, don’t lie to yourself.”
Fyodor Dostoevsky · The Brothers KaramazovAnd the translation question
Less important than the internet insists.
Constance Garnett translated nearly all of Dostoevsky in the early twentieth century, at speed, in prose that smooths his roughness into something rather more Edwardian than he ever was. Purists have complained about this for a hundred years, and they have a point. Her versions are also out of copyright, free, and on your phone in thirty seconds — which is worth considerably more than a purist’s approval when the alternative is not reading him at all.
If you’re buying a copy: Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky keep the awkwardness deliberately, and are either revelatory or exhausting depending on who you ask. Oliver Ready’s Crime and Punishment for Penguin is the one to hand to somebody who is nervous about the whole business.
Any of them beats the copy you don’t open.
The low-commitment route
There is, obviously, the option we are going to recommend, on the grounds that we built it.
One line each morning, from Dostoevsky and the rest of them, filed — with a completely straight face — under the cheerful headers the wellness internet uses. Wellness Wednesday. Thankful Thursday. It is not a substitute for the novels and it does not pretend to be. It is a reasonable way of working out, over a few weeks and no effort at all, which of the dead Russians you actually want to spend eight hundred pages with.
And if the answer turns out to be Chekhov rather than Dostoevsky, we have made that case too. If it turns out to be Gogol, we have written about what his strangest title actually means.
One masterpiece of Russian literature, every morning.
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