>>But it may go deeper than that. For me some of his works show too much of mental illness and I don't want to be dragged into that...
>
>Oh, now he's nuts? ;-) Maybe Dostoyevsky doesn't translate well into his own language.

Actually he had two mental problems, if you may call them so: epilepsy and gambling. Some of the descriptions of mental disturbance that you can find in "Crime and punishment" or "Doppelganger" are probably based on memory. And the "Gambler" is quite autobiographical.

One of our writers once said that "we keep comparing Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky as if they were colleagues. They were only by penmanship, but not otherwise. Tolstoy was a count, and never had to worry about his next meal; he had all the time he wanted and could hone his sentences endlessly. Dostoyevsky often wrote as fast as he could, to meet the publisher's deadline so he could get some money to eat and pay his debts."