Poor style. Dostoyevsky had a very good ear for how people talk and express their emotions, but a very sloppy hand when putting his observations on paper. His prose has been given many superlatives, but “elegant” is not one of them.
Shameless padding. Dostoyevsky was a patented procrastinator who worked best on his stories past deadlines. Add to this him being paid by volume, and you get a character line-up and storylines that are bloated like a C-grade TV melodrama.
Too long, too heavy. This partly comes from the padding. But also, in the classical Russian tradition, the longer your texts, the deeper they were considered to be. Our readers in the 19th century had a lot of time on their hands, and didn’t mind authors spending pages on things that we in modern time expect to be boiled down to a one-liner.
Russian character names. The grammar structure in Russian is loaded with suffixes and endings that express small variations in meaning and emotion. You may call me “Dima”, “Dimochka”, “Mityay”, “Dimon”, “Dmitri Anatolyevich”, “Dim”, and all that would convey a different meaning, depending on the situation. Characters in Dostoyevsky’s universe do that with each other’s names all the time. Translation of these subtleties in nouns is hard. With names it’s simply impossible. You’ll need footnotes to embed a particular name form in the situation. If you’re new to this, you’re left puzzled, where this endless stream of new names comes from all the time?
Flair for theatrical melodrama. Dostoyevsky was a commercial writer, with an acute sense for a prose that pushes all the right buttons. He knew for certain that in terms of sales volume, molasses beat salted licorice and bitter chocolate any day.
Social pørn. A new and exciting thing in the 19th century, this may still go in medicinal quantities now, but Dostoyevsky delivers it in spades, right in your face. His passionate focus on human misery and suffering will often leave you wondering which corner of the BDSM scene the man would call home if he happened to live now.
Xenophobic conservatism. Dostoyevsky was active in the era of a steep rise of Russian ethnic nationalism. He died before the age of pogroms, and the views expressed in his diaries lie somewhere between “indifference” and “distrust” on the scale of Judaeophobia. But he made up for this in his hate of Europeans, especially Poles, and liberals whom he considered a detrimental influence. Nowadays, his quotes are a bottomless source of memes shared by Russian nativists, radical liberals, born-again Orthodox and militant loyalists. He’s your man if you want to rise in arms against the dark demons of liberal democracy and Western globalism. If you start your acquaintance with Dostoyevsky from the memes they post on the Internet, it leaves you with an impression of a bigoted hillbilly hater from deep American South washed up in the 19th-century St. Petersburg.