Dostoevsky reading order

Twelve books by Dostoevsky, from the easiest to the hardest by ReadingRate’s difficulty score: from White Nights, read in an evening, to Demons.

12 books · 129 hours at an average pace · difficulty 40 to 64

Moderate

  1. White Nights by Fyodor Dostoevsky (1848): difficulty 40 of 100, Moderate, about 1.3 hours. A lonely dreamer meets a young woman on four nights in St Petersburg. The gentlest way in.
  2. The House of the Dead by Fyodor Dostoevsky (1862): difficulty 43 of 100, Moderate, about 8.1 hours, free to read on ReadingRate. Life in a Siberian prison, drawn from his own four years as a convict.
  3. Poor Folk by Fyodor Dostoevsky (1846): difficulty 46 of 100, Moderate, about 3.5 hours, free to read on ReadingRate. His first novel: letters between a poor copying clerk and the young woman he tries to help.
  4. The Gambler by Fyodor Dostoevsky (1867): difficulty 49 of 100, Moderate, about 4 hours, free to read on ReadingRate. A tutor at a German spa falls for roulette and for a woman who scorns him. Dictated in under a month to beat a publisher’s deadline.
  5. Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky (1866): difficulty 53 of 100, Moderate, about 15 hours, free to read on ReadingRate. A poor student kills a pawnbroker to test a theory about great men, then has to live with it.

Challenging

  1. The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoevsky (1869): difficulty 55 of 100, Challenging, about 17 hours, free to read on ReadingRate. A wholly good man returns to Petersburg society, and it cannot cope with him.
  2. The Eternal Husband by Fyodor Dostoevsky (1870): difficulty 56 of 100, Challenging, about 3.9 hours. A man learns his dead wife had a lover, and turns up at the lover’s door.
  3. The Double by Fyodor Dostoevsky (1846): difficulty 58 of 100, Challenging, about 2.7 hours. A timid clerk meets a man with his name and face, who takes over his life.
  4. The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky (1880): difficulty 58 of 100, Challenging, about 27 hours, free to read on ReadingRate. Three brothers, a murdered father and the question of God. His last and fullest novel.
  5. The Adolescent by Fyodor Dostoevsky (1875): difficulty 58 of 100, Challenging, about 19 hours. A young man’s account of his father, and of his own plan to grow rich. The least read of the five great novels.
  6. Notes from Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky (1864): difficulty 63 of 100, Challenging, about 3.9 hours, free to read on ReadingRate. A spiteful retired official argues against reason and progress, then shows what that has cost him. Short, but the key to the big novels.
  7. Demons by Fyodor Dostoevsky (1872): difficulty 64 of 100, Challenging, about 23 hours, free to read on ReadingRate. The summit: a provincial town and a cell of young revolutionaries, half satire and half tragedy.

Questions

Where should a beginner start?
With White Nights by Fyodor Dostoevsky, the easiest book on this list at difficulty 40 out of 100: about 1.3 hours at an average pace. Then The House of the Dead by Fyodor Dostoevsky (43) and Poor Folk by Fyodor Dostoevsky (46).
What is the hardest book on the list?
Demons by Fyodor Dostoevsky, at 64 out of 100 and about 23 hours at an average pace. It comes last, after the books that prepare for it.
How long does the whole list take?
About 129 hours at an average pace of 250 words a minute. The three longest books take 69 hours of them: The Brothers Karamazov (27 hours), Demons (23 hours) and The Adolescent (19 hours).
How is difficulty measured?
ReadingRate scores every book from 0 to 100 on how hard it is to read, from its prose and from what it asks of a reader. For a book of argument the score weighs how complex the argument is, what it assumes you already know, how opaque its terms are, how indirectly it makes its case and how much it tries to hold at once.

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