Dostoevsky's reputation for difficulty is partly justified and partly the result of a specific confusion: people assume that because the novels are long and Russian and concerned with profound philosophical questions, they must be slow going. In fact, Dostoevsky is one of the most propulsive novelists in the Western tradition. The difficulty is not in the reading — it is in deciding which novel to start with, and in accepting that the chaos of the narrative is intentional and will eventually cohere.
The standard advice is to begin with Crime and Punishment (1866), and the standard advice is correct. The novel has the most straightforward structure of the major works: a student commits a murder, convinced by his own theory that certain exceptional men are above conventional morality, and then spends the rest of the novel being destroyed by the gap between theory and psychological reality. The thriller plot — will he be caught? — runs alongside the philosophical investigation, and the combination produces a reading experience that is closer to a compelling crime novel than to the philosophical difficulty the reputation implies. Raskolnikov is one of the most vivid characters in all of fiction. The Pevear and Volokhonsky translation is the standard for English readers. The Pevear and Volokhonsky translation is available on Amazon.
After Crime and Punishment, the natural next step is The Idiot (1869) or Demons (also published as The Possessed, 1872), depending on your temperament. The Idiot is Dostoevsky's attempt to depict a genuinely good person — Prince Myshkin, who has epilepsy and an absolute incapacity for deception — and to show what happens when such a person encounters Russian society. Demons is a political novel about nihilists and revolutionaries that reads, in retrospect, as a prescient account of the dynamics that produced the Russian Revolution. Both are available in the Pevear and Volokhonsky translation. For most readers, The Idiot is the warmer choice and Demons the more intellectually urgent one.
The end point of any engagement with Dostoevsky is The Brothers Karamazov (1880), his final novel and the one that most readers and most critics consider his greatest achievement. The novel contains everything: a murder mystery, a theological argument between the three brothers (faith versus doubt, action versus contemplation, the noble versus the base), some of the most powerful prose in the nineteenth-century novel, and the Grand Inquisitor chapter — a dialogue between the returned Christ and a cardinal of the Inquisition — that is one of the most famous passages in world literature. The Brothers Karamazov is not a book you can read in a week and absorb properly; it is a book that rewards returning to. The literary fiction shelf at byallo carries the Pevear and Volokhonsky translation.
A note on translation: for English readers, the Pevear and Volokhonsky translation has been the consensus choice since their Crime and Punishment appeared in 1992. It is more literal than earlier translations, which means it preserves some of the roughness and repetition of Dostoevsky's Russian rather than smoothing it into something more elegant. Some readers prefer Constance Garnett's older translations for their English prose style; others prefer the newer translations by Oliver Ready (Crime and Punishment, 2014) for their freshness. Any of these will give you access to the essential Dostoevsky; the differences are matters of texture rather than substance.
A note on names: Russian novels use multiple names for each character — formal name, diminutive, patronymic — and Dostoevsky uses them all. Raskolnikov is Rodion, Rodya, Rodenka; Alyosha Karamazov is Alexei Fyodorovich Karamazov. Modern editions include a cast of characters at the front for reference. Use it. After fifty pages, the names will feel natural, but the first chapter of a Dostoevsky novel will be easier if you know in advance that the same person may appear under three different names in the same paragraph.
The other thing to know in advance: Dostoevsky's plots are genuinely chaotic — characters arrive, depart, return with changed circumstances; multiple storylines run simultaneously; apparent digressions turn out to be central. This is not carelessness. Dostoevsky was writing for serial publication in magazines, under constant deadline pressure, and the chaos is also the energy. Trust it. The novels cohere, but they cohere in the way that a long argument coheres — through accumulation and contradiction rather than through elegant structure.
Reading order recommendation: Crime and Punishment first, then The Brothers Karamazov, then return to the works in between if you want more. The Brothers Karamazov at byallo is available on the literary fiction shelf — it is the entry point to the shelf and the standard against which all ambitious fiction is measured.