I’ve been obsessed with Dostoevsky for a long time. I remember walking into a random bookstore when I was in my early twenties (I don’t recall what city anymore; Manhattan?) and seeing a dozen of his thick masterpieces on the shelf (Crime and Punishment; The Brothers Karamazov; The Idiot; The Double; etc). Back then—17 or 18 years ago now—I felt both drawn to and overwhelmed by the author. Intimidated, certainly. For one thing: Most of his books were gigantic. Door-stopper books. I recalled a book which was a “fictional memoir” about his years in a Siberian hard-labor prison.
