Which Dostoyevsky novel would you recommend to someone who has not read any of his novels?
Dostoyevksy can be quite challenging, they are dense with words (seems to be a Russian trait) and it is necessary to persist with them when you start, but the payoff is worth it. I would suggest as a first novel Crime and Punishment, it is probably the shortest of the novels I mentioned, but it contains all the great themes of his writings in microcosm. In short, if you didn't like this one you probably would not like the others. Basically Crime and Punishment is Dostoyevksy's refutation of Nietzscheism - specifically the idea of the superman - the exceptional human being who can and should disregard human morality in order to advance human civilization. The protagonist of the novel Raskolnikov is an impoverished student corrupted by the influence of atheistic philosophy in his university. He conceives a plan to murder an elderly female pawnbroker and steal her money, rationalising it to himself that she is a parasite and that he will use the money to become a great man and philanthropist. After breaking the moral law everything immediately begins to go wrong for him.
I have re-read this novel several times since I first read it as a young man in the mid-90s but I never forget the first time. When I came to the final page it felt almost physically painful for the story to be over. One particular scene that was particularly memorable is a confrontation between Raskolnikov and the detective investigating the murder of the old woman, I think his name is Porfirovich or something like that. He says to Raskolnikov that it is misconception that people think his job largely consists of hunting down evidence and tracking down murderers, on the contrary he says many of them come to him and confess on their knees begging forgiveness as if he were a priest. Another passage that strikes me as been very prescient of our times is Raskolnikov's dream towards the end - he dreams of a world where a virus breaks out across the globe but the disease causes the sufferer to believe that the healthy are the sick and that he alone is healthy.
The prevalent themes in Dostoyevsky's great novels is of man without God. The Demons is basically about the rise of socialism, a philosophy that he claimed - correctly - would flood the world with blood. A svengali character in this book who is the leader of a socialist cell admits to one of his group that he is "a scoundrel and not a socialist" and that his only true goal is power. He says the following memorable lines - I am paraphrasing because I don't have my print copy with me at the moment but it is something like this:
"There are many all across Russia right now who work for the cause of socialism and don't even know it. The teacher who ridicules our traditions and teaches children to laugh at their God is ours. The lawyer who says that all crime is the result of evil environment already belongs to us. And all across Russia the mothers are drunk, the children are drunk, the churches are empty..."
Dostoyevsky seems to be the lone voice speaking against what we would today called progressive politics in his time and for that reason can be considered to be more that a writer but in fact a prophet, and his books have a completely contemporary feel to them for the things that are happening in the USA and throughout the world.
Anyway, good luck, I hope you get even half the joy I got from his books, if they turn out to be your type of thing you are in for a treat.
