How many have actually read his works? I have most of them but have finished few- they are pretty tough going.
I wish I could write like him though.
I read Crime and Punishment.
Didn’t have any problem going straight through, and if his other books are similar I wouldn’t be worried about going through them. I always prefered reading a sample of books when it came to classics, so even authors I particularly liked like Honore De Balzac, I’ve never read more than one work of.
Read Crime and Punishment and liked it, but that was really long ago.
Then I stole a copy (or borrowed and never returned) of The Brothers Karamazov from my local library and it seems like the punishment for my crime is that I’ll never finish the damn thing. Coming to think of it it’s probably time again for my yearly attempt at it. The book has great parts but somehow it just doesn’t hold me all the way to the end.
I read The Brothers Karamazov in high school about 30 years ago; not that I can remember any of it, other than it had nothing to do with juggling 
I’ve read both Crime and Punishment* and *The Brothers Karamazov in high school and college, respectively. Yeah, tough going, but some scenes have stayed with me (and it’s 40 years ago.)
I was supposed to have read Crime and Punishment for school. I skimmed it. If I had read it, I might have a more positive view of the work.
OTOH, I was assigned it about three months after I had to give up on the other great work of Russian Literature: I had tried War and Peace on my own and found it thoroughly unreadable, even though I made it through about 300 pages before raising the white flag. With that experience I was far less willing to give Dostoyevsky an honest chance. I really should try it again sometime. (But I doubt I will.)
I have read major parts of Crime and Punishment, and The Idiot. Whenever I found them getting too long winded, I skipped pages. Often, lots of pages. 
The shorter novel, the Gambler, I read entirely.
For those of you who couldn’t get through the book Crime and Punishment, I recommend watching the remake of the book as a miniseries from 2002, starring John Simm (From Life on Mars). Very true to the book, in getting the spirit and the central theme of it just right, fastpaced, dramatic, and beautifully filmed.
A recommendation from IMDB, that I fully agree with:
I’ve read Crime and Punishment, and I really enjoyed the first half or so. I found it Macbeth-like. But when the focus of the book turned to redemption, I thought it rang false.
I’ve read the Brothers, idiot, Notes from Underground, the Gambler, the possessed, and Crime and Punishment (3-4 times). C+P is best during the winter in an underheated and squalid house whilst cooking your own soups made from whatever is at hand. I’ve always enjoyed the Russians.
I’ve read most of his stuff as a young man, surely the best time to read him 
I’ve always found him to be very readable - he’s a special writer for me because it was the first serious literature I picked up that I actually enjoyed. I just read fantasy and SF as a teenager, and thought an ancient writer with a long Russian name would be a nightmare. To discover that it was actually exciting, tightly plotted stuff was very de-mystifying for me and opened up a world of writing.
It’s all good stuff, but I’d go with Notes from the underground and Karamazov as the two real masterpieces.
I have read, and enjoyed, Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov (both when I was in my 20’s, after having heard about them often enough to think, “I really ought to read that.”)
Crime and Punishment, in many ways, reads like a modern suspense thriller or murder mystery, only more intense, more real, and more philosophical. Raskolnikov is one of the very few characters in literature I have found myself both identifying with and loathing.
I read Crime and Punishment while backpacking through Poland during the winter.
I’ve read Crime and Punishment. I can’t say I found it pleasant, but I nonetheless consider it one of the best books I’ve ever read. Raskolnikov is a character that really sticks with you.
I’ve tried to read The Brothers Karamazov and The Idiot, but never could make it very far in.
I read Crime and Punishment in high school, and liked it quite a bit. I read The Brothers Karamazov one summer in college, mostly I think because I wanted to prove to myself that even though I was majoring in physics and math I was still capable of reading “great literature”. I enjoyed parts of it a great deal, but it definitely took more effort to get through.
Do you happen to know where I can purchase that? 'Cause I’ve been wanting to see it for ages. . .
. . .as to the question. . .I’ve read Crime and Punishment, Notes from Underground, a lot of The Idiot, and a fair chunk of The Brothers Karamazov. I think there might’ve been some smaller pieces that I’ve read, too, though I can’t think of any off the top of my head.
I love Crime and Punishment. Love love love. It’s my favorite bok ever. I about cried when the copy I brought everywhere with me was destroyed due to a basement leak (about two months ago), because it had all of my highlights and notes. I’ve been looking for a replacement, but the current editions that I’ve found that use the Garnett translation (which is what that one was) aren’t really to my liking, dimensions-wise. Have a couple of other translations, too.
Liked the shorter stuff I read, and Notes from Underground, too. The part of The Brothers Karamazov I read wasn’t bad, either. The Idiot, I had a LOT of problems getting into, and I pretty much abandoned it about 2/3 of the way through.
**Crime and Punishment ** was assigned reading for my HS senior English class. In fact it was the first book we read that year. I *really * liked it. So much so that when it came time to choose a topic for a term paper, I chose a comparison/contrast study of the religious themes in C+P to those in The Brothers Karamazov. So I read that one also.
Got an A- on the paper.
So much is dependent on the translation. Constance Garnett basically brought Dostoyevsky to the English-speaking world, and her translations are still often read today. They are Victorian in the extreme, and they cleave very closely to the original Russian. I know maybe five words of Russian so I really cannot comment on her technique, per se, but personally, I find them unbearable. For the longest time I thought I did not really like Dostoyevsky, despite my best efforts. I thought there was something wrong with me.
Then I read something not translated by Garnett and my opinion did a 180.
I read at least parts of Crime and Punishment and Brothers in high school, ages ago. The details are too fuzzy for me to have a comment.
Right now, the thing I’m wondering is: why can’t I read the word Raskolnikov without hearing Boris Badinov saying it?
I tried to read Crime and Punishment last fall. I was somewhere between 100-150 pages and absolutely nothing interesting had happened yet, so I gave up.
Vladimir Nabokov is notorious both for thinking Dostoyevsky “third-rate” and for being an extreme literalist in matters of translation.
There are a buncha tribute books out there written by Nabokov’s former students and admirers–it is funny to see them all sort of sadly apologize for this failing of their master–along the lines of “of course it must be admitted that he was wrong about Dostoyevsky.”
I can see Nabokov’s point–he thought Dostoyevsky wrote sentimental melodramatic mystery stories with improbable characters. He thought Dostoyevsky was a bad psychologist–that his characters were one-offs, not everymen. And, he’s right–the characters in Karamazov, for instance, are all bizarro beings, and simplistic peasant Christian love is not going to solve the world’s problems. Nonetheless, that’s not enough to put me off Dostoyevsky because I don’t need all my lit to be realistic.
Nabokov’s big project was a translation of Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin. Onegin is poetry, and Nabokov’s overly-literal handling of it killed any music it may have in the Russian. One of the fun parts though is that Nabokov uses the notes, preface, etc. to eviscerate previous translators, including particularly Constance Garnett–he shows that she both mangled and omitted important parts of the work.