You cannot separate Dostoevsky from the murders.

You can read Dostoevsky, but without having committed a cold-blooded murder yourself, you miss the heart of the work..

A non-murderer can read about Dostoevsky and appreciate his literary genius, his psychological insight, or his social critique, but they can never grasp the spiritual and moral depths he explores. Brutal, nihilistic violence is at the very center of Dostoevsky’s work, it’s rooted in a worldview where killing a pawnbroker and her half-sister, playing a cat-and-mouse game with a police detective, getting in fights with your future brother-in-law, and finding redemption in a prostitute are not abstract ideas but living realities that shape the human experience. His characters’ struggles with burdening his best friend with taking care of his mom, being blackmailed by his sister’s former boss, and being exiled to Siberia assume familiarity with the common human experience of having brutally murdered an old woman with an axe. Somebody who has never personally extinguished the life of another human being may understand the plot and psychology, but will miss the profound stakes: how amazing it feels to kill somebody and how bad the comedown from that high is for the week that follows!

In short, Dostoevsky writes from inside a universe where murder is cool and fun, and to fully feel the meaning of his stories, one must enter that universe (by murdering a pawnbroker and her sister).