DOSTOEVSKY - Where to Start? | Complete LIST + all books RANKED

           

                         

Dostoyevsky and his work should be of great interest to psychiatrists: he has, after all, been called ‘the Shakespeare of the asylum’ (Reference AppignanesiAppignanesi 2008). Even a cursory acquaintance with his novels reveals that many, if not most, of his characters teeter on the brink of mental instability.‘Is everyone mad’, asks the narrator of A Raw Youth (first published 1875; 

Reference DostoyevskyDostoyevsky 1947 reprint: p. 65). Characters are afflicted by brain fever, they start to ramble and have a mad gleam in their eyes.They are offended by slights to their dignity. They become feverish and announce their personal philosophy of life. 

They talk about God and beauty. They make disturbing confessions and create scandalous scenes.As well as the countless portrayals of insanity, there are descriptions of alcoholism, epilepsy, idiocy, sexual abuse, suicide, pathological gambling and personality disorder. Dostoyevsky took an interest in psychology and read contemporary writers on the subject. Indeed, he specifically discusses theories of madness, most memorably in the court scene in The Brothers Karamazov (1880), where various experts pontificate on the sanity or otherwise of Dmitri Karamazov. Dostoyevsky was wary that the theories of psychology could be used to absolve an individual of responsibility for their actions, and he recurrently poked fun at what he called ‘the psychologists’

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/advances-in-psychiatric-treatment/article/is-everyone-mad-the-depiction-of-mental-disturbance-in-the-work-of-dostoyevsky/93AA567E56C90363B561FCB6077AE6F8#

As Jeff is obviously a Patient who has 'absconded' or self-discharged from His Mental Hospital/Institution[hence the 'that's My Robe' line etc] it would follow that all characters are in fact also Patients with various [Psychiatric] 'ailments' . And that My friend is that. Jeff is a well-read 'Crazy Heart' Schizophrenic He has been 'Jewels Programmed' as a child and has been witness to a very traumatic scenario involving firearms -the [repressed]memory of which- hangs over Him like a giant poisonous shadow that saps His soul and festers away -there was once a murderer from the beginning...