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I'm in the mood for a different sort of Clarissa

Like the one in the novel "Clarissa."

Did you know that's one of the longest books in English lit?
I'll set some time aside for her, after the fourteen books I have queued for this year.

Maybe we can have a Clarissa reading club.

She was certainly an interesting character.....

At long last, I've got round to starting Dostoevsky's Devils.

“Clarissa” was long...but I couldn’t put it down.

I once read an 800-page biography in one day. And I’m no speed reader.

“War and Peace” is around 1,500 pages of soap opera, with grand themes mixed in. And 100 pages totally devoted to the military hardware of the Napoleonic Wars.

Let us know your thoughts later on, it's always fascinating (to me) to hear different perspectives when it comes to Dostoevsky.

I think of Dostoyevsky as a psychological realist with considerable tinges of idealism.

The way, say, he depicts someone with “consumption” (tuberculosis) is incredible.

Been wanting to read this for a while too. (If only i had time..) let us know your thoughts.

I'm reading 'The End' by Karl Ove Knausgaard which is the last in his 6-volume account of his own life in microscopic observational detail.

the guy is a definite candidate for a bit of remote spectrum diagnosing if you ask me

Yes, and the same goes for epilepsy, doesn't it?

Epilepsy plagued his own life and his first wife died of tuberculosis - a slow and painful death - so he was well acquainted with both conditions. A lot of situations and relationship dynamics between people (in his books) are heavily inspired/rooted in his own personal experiences and give a raw authenticity and "vividness" to his characters and their motivations. His profound compassion and understanding of extreme suffering and deprivation were also born out of his own experiences. "Never have I seen on a human face such an expression of accumulated suffering..." writes a French diplomat after meeting him.

Yep. Epilepsy, too. Wasn't Mishkin, in "The Idiot," an epileptic?

Myshkin was an epileptic, as was Smerdyakov from Brothers K. Smerdyakov is one of the most underrated characters in the Dostoevsky canon; I think he, Alyosha Karamazov and Prince Myshkin are the best three examples of the profundity of Dostoevsky's psychological insight mentioned earlier.

He was - his courtship of Aglaya and a few other details are also inspired by Dostoevsky's own experiences.

I bet a lot of aspies loved Myshkin if they read the book!

I certainly liked him.

I don't understand those who make the superficially obvious link between Myshkin (or Alyosha) and Christ; Christ was capable of vindictiveness and even malevolence (in the etymological sense of "ill-will"), while the former two were unimpeachable examples of the perfectly altruistic, benevolent character. A better figure to compare them to would perhaps be the Buddha, though presumably Dostoevsky wouldn't have considered him Russian enough.

Dostoevsky himself writes in his notebooks about Myshkin as a Christ-like figure. I never heard that about Alyosha, considering The Brothers Karamazov was meant as the first part of a trilogy, his fate was not determined and some of Dostoevsky's plans didn't sound particularly... Christly.

Keep in mind that he was deeply religious and believed in the messianic mission of Orthodoxy.