5/5stars

Absolutely loved it

Call out IPPOLIT! (in a Frodo-like manor) and you might sum up this book in a tidy, if only tad simplistic, manner. Dostoyevsky enjoys giving a certain character in his books a long speech, one that speaks to the heart of the book, and this time it's Ippolit, not our fair prince, who makes off with the metaphorical wedding cake in this book about goodness, the "woman problem," the abomination of the Catholic church (Dostoyevsky was horrified by it), and the dilemma of ordinary people. What should one do with them as a writer? Why should they exist? Dostoyevsky writes that 99 percent of humankind was commonplace, average, a boring sort of brute who followed practicalities. Hard not to disagree sometimes. We're meant to see our prince as a Christ-like figure, once again rejected by society--even "good" society--a thought that was provoking in its time, but perhaps not so much now.

As expected for a Dostoyevsky, this is a book of grand ideas, but it didn't have the same effect on me as previous works. I felt disappointed by Rogozhin's disappearance from the main push of the book and even Nastasya's character isn't a driver of the action. Lebedyev is disappointingly a rather large portion of the middle third of the novel. The good stuff, the characters I really enjoyed, felt pushed aside too often. I'd rank Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov as must-reads. The Idiot?

Review to come. Next year.

I loved it. so much love.