After two waves of Dostoeveki's influence on me, I started feeling bored and vexed by innaturalness of (I thought) everything in his books: language, feelings, appearences of the charachters, author's preachings, and the very narratives. Sorry to confess that all this came to me to stay.

Is this just me? I am very interested in opinions and here's what I managed to collect regarding 'The Idiot.'

The article is here:
http://www.bellaonline.com/articles/art29234.asp

Tatiana,

Ofcourse I read the Duch translation of "Crime and Punishment", because I can't understand and read Russian.
But I think I do not aggree with you on Dostojevski.
For me he is one of the most inportant western and European writers,
next to my other favorite writers Franz Kafka and Herman Hesse.
Maybe I do not like so much the typical naturalism in Slavian literature
like so many Poles and Russians do.
Dostojevski writes a razor-sharp Proza, whith an exellent psychololgical description of the often frightening characters (like Raskalnikov "the murderer" and his interrogators), and the Russian (St.Petersburg) society of the 19th centurey. There is nearly some psycho-analitical content in his writing, before there was even Freud.
You have to see him in his time, and not in our days that we are overwhelemd by terrible information of the 20th century and the past before that. He wrote his novels in Zharist times in a country which was stil feudal. But in the Duch translation I was catched by the content and the atmosphere of the novel. In my fathers library there were also novels of Gogel which I read too. I loved The Overcoat and "St. Petersburg Stories" Both writers have a strange sort of irony or sarcasm, anyway a sort of Russian humor I can appreciate.
Nikolay (Vasilyevich) Gogol (1809-1852) influenced both Dostoevsky's
(1821-1881) and Kafka's(1883-1924) work.

Pieter

Thank you Pieter! I suspected that things I stopped liking in Dostoevski's books can be seen differently upon translations.

I love Kafka and even more I love Hesse, especially The Glass Bead Game. Of course I highly appreciate "Steppenwolf" and "Siddhartha" -- but the "Game" is something I can use as a therapy, quite contrary to what I feel while reading Dostoevski.

Considering that reading Dostoevski influenced me so strong that I felt physically ill for days after, maybe my current attitude is just my body's reaction?

There's an excellent comparative analysis of Leo Tolstoi and Dostoevski by a Russian writer and publicist of late 1800s, Veresaev the parts titled correspondingly: "Live Life" and "Mankind is Doomed" -- this is exactly my view of them!