I am now fully convinced that the reading of Dostoyevsky is best appreciated in the there-after, instead of the present-time. That said, this novel is a melodramatic and overzealous pairings and sparings among a large (although extremely well developed) set of characters---"frenemies," if you will....ugh. However, it is the complexities in trying to decipher Dostoyevsky's symbolizism of the "idiot" (who is one really, why, how, and for what purpose in society) that one gets the shocking breadth of this immense work in the there-after.