Dostoyevsky as an antidote to Henry James

Part 2 of Dostoyevsky's "The Idiot" - some months later - Prince Myshkin returns to Petersburg from Moscow, where he has claimed his inheritance, and now he's a rich man, but he wears his riches poorly - he's awkward and uncomfortable in his expensive clothes that don't quite seem to fit him right (everyone knows someone like that). We know what his quest will be: he needs to find Nastasya, whom he had impulsively propose to on the day that they met - those Russians! - and who spurned him, and two other suitors as well, and took off into the night with the no-good Rogozhin, telling everyone that, though she turned aside a "bid" of 100,000 rubles, she's basically nothing but a whore. Myshkin is obviously still in love with her, to the extent that he even understands his own feelings, and has now returned to claim her - or, more accurately, to save her - he is clearly one of Dostoyevsky's "holy fools," not exactly a religious character but one who lives in the world and slightly apart from it, like a saint or even like Jesus himself, minus the preaching. Part 2 seems as if it will take place mostly in a dacha outside of Petersburg, so we'll see a whole different Russian cultural subset - and I don't think it will have the unity of time as did Part 1, which amazingly took place all in one day. How good is The Idiot? It doesn't have the well-engineered plot of Crime and Punishment, nor the scope of The Brothers Karamazov - but it's still Dostoyevsky, passionate, kind of insane, a panoply of characters every one of whom lives full out, at the furthest extremes of their emotions. I am, in part, still recovering from reading James's The Ambassadors, and I think I picked up The Idiot in part as an antidote: James's characters spend pages, or hours, picking at the frayed edges of their emotions and never come right out and say what the mean or feel, and their actions are all measured and repressed and tenuous. Dostoyevsky characters are the exact opposite - in particular Prince Myshkin, who is labeled as an "idiot" because he has no self-censorship - he comes right out and says what's in his mind or hard, he (and the others) make impulsive decisions, and they do everything in the broadest possible strokes - impervious to embarrassment and self-consciousness. James's novels nearly die from the lack of life, from oxygen starvation, from bloodlessness - Dostoyevsky's overwhelm us with the tumult of life at its most extreme and emotions at their highest pitch.