I just finished reading this book tonight. It is my third Dostoevsky book (Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov are the others and have already been posted on this here blog). It is my third favorite of the three. That being said, I enjoyed this book. Dostoevsky is just so, so good.
The book is about this guy who, as one character in the book explains, "anyone who chose could deceive him, and...he would forgive anyone afterwards who had deceived him..." I think that line sums up the hero of this novel best. Another line, from the same character, describes him as "Don Quixote, only serious and not comic."
Dostoevsky stated in letters to others while writing this book that he was attempting to create "a perfectly beautiful man." He is a "holy fool" and a Christ-type figure. Everyone views him as an idiot because of his simpleness. But at the same time everyone recognizes his compassion and tendency to sympathize with all and see the good in others no matter what. He is viewed as an idiot because he is different than the rest of society. He seemed to me to be quite intelligent and a man with a pure heart.
There were ups and downs in the book. The book is split into 4 parts. All of Part One is simply fantastic. It started so good that I thought that I would maybe like it as much as or more than the other two books of his that I have read. Part Two dropped off a bit for me as our hero takes somewhat of a backseat to other characters. I really liked the last few chapters of Part Two and the first few chapters of Part Three. The book ends tremendously as the second half of Part Four is very well done. That's how I see it anyway.
There is also this extremely tremendous bit of a guy describing a painting he saw of Christ in the tomb and how it made him feel. It is pure Dostoevsky awesomeness. I want to quote it in here verbatim but it's pretty long. It's just something that you won't read in any book anywhere else other than in a Dostoevsky book. Oh, and here's a picture of the painting:
There's also interesting parts about what goes on in the mind of a man who is on the verge of being executed. Dostoevsky would know because he was sentenced to death when he was 28 and was let off the hook at the last second. And by let off the hook, I mean sent to a prison in Siberia for four years and then forced into the Russian military for six years.
This is a good book and worth a looksie. But if you haven't read Dostoevsky then I would recommend you read Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov first.
I've gone on surprisingly long, so I will limit the quote selections:
"Grown-up people do not know that a child can give exceedingly good advice even in the most difficult case.... The soul is healed by being with children."
"God has just such gladness every time he sees from heaven that a sinner is praying to Him with all his heart, as a mother has when she sees the first smile on her baby's face...; that is the whole conception of God as our Father and of God's gladness in man, like a father's in his own child"
"[F]rom my numerous observations, our Liberals are never capable of letting anyone else have a conviction of his own without at once meeting their opponent with abuse or even something worse."
"In scattering the seed, scattering your 'charity,' your kind deeds, you are giving away, in one form or another, part of your personality, and taking into yourself part of another; you are in mutual communion with one another, a little more attention and you will be rewarded with the knowledge of the most unexpected discoveries. You will come at last to look upon your work as a science; it will lay hold of all your life, and may fill up your whole life. On the other hand, all your thoughts, all the seeds scattered by you, perhaps forgotten by you, will grow up and take form. He who has received them from you will hand them on to another. And how can you tell what part you may have in the future determination of the destinies of humanity?"
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