3 weeks ago
20
So, I've read some Dostoyevsky in Finnish. Brothers Karamazov in full as a recent translation, and I thought it oscillated between brilliant and tedious. I've made it halfway through Crime & Punishment once. The Idiot, maybe 100 or 200 pages.
There are a lot of things I could say about his work, but the one thing I've never seen in his work is humour. Yet, readers here and in other places where I encounter English-speaking opinions of him, often praise how funny he can be.
Has it been lost in Finnish translation? Is the humour too grim for me (I'm Finnish and I'm all too familiar with the Shouting Incoherently While Drunk irl so that I can't quite enjoy it in literature)? Did I miss something in my attempt to read Famously Deep Classics?
What is his humour like? What do you like about it? Can you point me to a passage or two?
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