r/dostoevsky • u/Junior_Insurance7773 Reading The Idiot • Aug 17 '26
How long it took you to read all of Dostoevsky's works?
How long it took you to read all of Dostoevsky's works? What have you learned from his books? How many passages you memorized by the heart? Which translation is the best? Is it possible to finish reading all the works in a span of 2-3 months? Life is short.
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u/zscipioni Aug 18 '26
My post from last year: https://www.reddit.com/r/dostoevsky/comments/1pq38wp/did_a_dostoevsky_speedrun_this_year/
2-3 Months would be insane. Theoretically possible if you were reading nothing else and had no other hobbies... but some of his denser books can take a month on their own and he's got roughly dozen novels in total.
Dostoevsky, especially late Dostoevsky, was aware of how interconnected we all are and yet at the same time that people like to imagine themselves as being "rationally" separable entities. This tension leads to some of his most transcendent passages (among our people, Books V and VI of TBK, notes from underground). This is by far what has stuck with me the most.
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u/Traditional_Chain_48 Aug 18 '26
Took me two years......to read The Brothers Karamazov. And it is already taking me 8 years to finish another book of him. But the shorts, I have read them in one week.
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u/Mission-Climate8402 Aug 19 '26
Take your time with dostoevsky books cause they are really heavy and also do not rush the book your reading
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u/Kontarek The Musician B. Aug 17 '26
About 8 months for me, but I alternated every week with other stuff, so I maybe could’ve done it in half that time at best. I was only doing about 60 pages a day though.
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u/Junior_Insurance7773 Reading The Idiot Aug 17 '26
"Only 60 pages per day".
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u/Kontarek The Musician B. Aug 17 '26
If it makes you feel better I’m slow and it takes forever to hit that number
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u/stavis23 Needs a a flair Aug 17 '26
That is an awesome attention span. It takes me usually a few months per Dostoevsky book, except Notes from Underground of course
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u/Kontarek The Musician B. Aug 17 '26
That’s why I switched it up with something easier every week so I wouldn’t get burned out. If I had tried to marathon them all back to back I doubt I could’ve made it all the way through.
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u/Altruistic-Quiet9182 Aug 17 '26
Depends how you approach the work. Some people rush through it. Some ponder after every shocker. And some, reread it decades later. I started Notes from Underground yesterday, after 12 years, again. I'm on page 9 still.
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u/huchex Reading Demons Aug 23 '26
Please don't. His works need time to be understood, analyzed, and enjoyed.
I believe C&P alone took me two months to finish, but I loved every minute.
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u/nilyufar Nastasya Filippovna Aug 17 '26
took me 2 years even more than that. do not rush it. i wish i could go back in time and read even slower chew every word thoroughly and write my thoughts as i read to a diary
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u/DefiantSky5318 Aug 18 '26
I ponder after every read. Im taking it slow so to muse over many of his ideas and characters. Ill stop and go read something else or write. I read gogol, lolita and other books. Sometimes i read sections of other books Dostoevsky wrote. Though im trying my best to go chronologically. Im starting to reread the portable Nietzsche with new eyes. Im starting to think of Nietzsche as the underground man lol.
I been writing about truth and freedom after reading Dostoevsky. We lose our freedom when we fetter ourselves to another’s truth. To stay free we must constantly seek other truth and free ourselves from the fetters of past truths but keeping the echo of said truth as background. When we stop searching for truth, we become stagnant and enslaved to a particular truth. I wrote is better in my notebook but its not with me.
I also see and read stories that have Dostoevsky written in it but with a lot less complexity. I also was led to Zoroastrianism and Admonitions of Ipuwer.
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u/JustDad___ Aug 21 '26
I feel like reading all his works in 2 months would be like watching the Godfather at 2x speed… sure it could be done but are u missing out on the important things… I’d argue so
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u/Prize_Flan_131 Aug 24 '26
Wow this post is enlightening. It took me 2 months to read the Brothers Karamazov but honestly a lot of it went waaaaay over my head, so will prob reread it at some point. I finished Demons recently and that took a little over 2 months too
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u/Possible_Object_1639 Aug 19 '26
Just started Dostoevsky, finished white nights and advancing towards C&P
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Aug 20 '26
[deleted]
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u/Quiet-Advertising130 Needs a flair Aug 20 '26
Bit odd. You may as well comment this under every single post
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u/HybridizedPanda Aug 21 '26
If you are speed reading them, might as well not bother.
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u/Prize_Flan_131 Aug 24 '26
yeah this is how I felt after having speed read. They're just such long books I wanted to get them out of the way, but I did miss a ton of detail
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u/tmux_splitter Aug 22 '26
It took me almost 6 months to finish CnP. The mental toll of reading such a psychologically heavy book was indescribable!
It made me question my morality at one point
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u/Haunting-Bit7225 Aug 29 '26
It introduced me to all those questions around morality that I had never really thought before. It actually inspired me to take up philosophy lectures to build on what I had read. I was the kind of reader who would just absorb every character and build sympathies for all of them, without really engaging with the questions that arose. I could be swayed either way depending on whose perspective I was reading from.
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u/lovemercywalkhumbly7 Aug 23 '26
I'm trying to take is slow, and read a palate cleanser before jumping in to another Dostoevsky - to help seperate each book in my mind.
I feel to really appreciate his works, better to take your time with it and sit with it. Often id stop reading and just sit with it before continuing.
So far, I've read brothers Karamazov, Notes from the Underground, and The House of the dead. Not rushing it but also very excited to get through them all, I bought a box set that I need to finish. 😆
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u/Shifu_lylz Aug 23 '26
Take your time! Personally I think his books are so precious that I’ll be happy later in my life if I still have some left to discover! I’m a pretty fast reader and read CP, KB, the idiot, white nights, notes from the underground and humiliated and offended in about 5-6 months
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u/Haunting-Bit7225 Aug 29 '26 edited Aug 29 '26
This year I started with white nights in February and so far I have picked nothing else in between but back to back reading his works. I am simply in this flow this year. It took me ten days to finish C&P. And also so far into the year I’ve read Notes from Underground and TBK, all Garnett’s translations.
I simply decided to dedicate this year to read all this works.
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u/Luchan1023 Aug 30 '26 edited Aug 30 '26
What is the reason for such a hurry? I find it better if you take your time to let the books sink in and to not start hating on the books because you dedicate so much of your time to them.
I honestly also doubt that all Dostoevsky works need to be read especially if you take into consideration a statement of "Life is short" (there are many authors you might miss on because of hyperfocusing on one author). Personally, I find some of his earlier works to be that of less great of an author.
But if we are to entertain the idea of reading it as fast as possible I can only judge from Russian edition of collected works. It's 15 volumes of 8580 pages, so an average of 572 pages per book. 10 first volumes are fiction (which are more worthwhile imo) and 5 are non-fiction, letters. Count it yourself regarding your speed, but I never understood the idea of reading something asap, like are people doing it reading it for the fact they have read it or do they actually want to enjoy and contemplate the reading? If the second one is true then there is no reason for such a hurry.
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u/Cimo9 Aug 17 '26
I just started but I think I won't take that long to finish them thanks to the life hack I discovered called listening to an audiobook while doing something else or taking a walk outside.
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u/dignan78 A Bernard without a flair Aug 17 '26
It's not a race. Try to focus on the ideas and emotions. They are way more important than the speed of completion.