This is a delightful translation even rendering murderers into ‘moiderers’.
On the text, Dostoevsky’s characters have a complexity and temperament that at first seems bizarre, to be attested to cultural differences, but on closer inspection feels like the kind of complexity that comes with emotional considerations, faults, and manias spanning across years. Few other books make you feel so right to be fallible.
The story never seems to be about anything in particular, it’s episodic and I’m yet to feel the great arc that the epilogue implies. The redemptive, Christ-like?, ending feels almost Straussian, and I feel it should not be believed.