Dostoyevsky's "Crime and Punishment" -- is it really "bad writing"?

Crime and Punishment, by Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Translation Constance Garnett. 

My first reaction as I read Crime and Punishment was that this must have blown the minds of Russian readers in the nineteenth century. Reading this novel is to live in the paranoid, obsessive mind of Raskolnikov. He barely has a grip on reality. I wondered how he had managed to get as far as he had as a student! That he carries out the brutal murder of two women (one who is an innocent that happens upon the scene of his murdering the first) is not surprising, and seems strangely logical. The murder scene is mesmerizing.

And although he believes himself above the law, that is, that the criminal law does not apply to him because he is an extraordinary person, he is aware enough to try to avoid and evade the law and the investigators as they pursue the murderer. He hides the  stolen money. He prepares his words carefully to throw suspicion off him. It's an exhausting book -- I'm not sure I enjoyed reading it.

It's startlingly different from reading Tolstoy. With Tolstoy, the nuances of the dialogs and narration are always clear. Not so in Crime and Punishment -- people speak in loopy sentences and paragraphs often negating their own meaning within the same sentence. With Tolstoy, you come to understand and feel sympathy for almost everyone. But in Crime and Punishment, almost everyone remains an enigma. There are endless dialogs that I can hardly follow. There are tedious long sequences, sometimes semi-comic, such as the dinner scenes and the domestic dramas among the poor denizens of the neighborhood. I don't know what role Garnett's translation played. I believe I read that Nabokov had problems with Dostoyevsky, and preferred Tolstoy.

And yet, amid all the dead wood, the book comes to life and surges with power. You've got to know what Razumikhin has in mind to help Raskonikov, and why he's so loyal to him. You've got to know if  Raskolnikov's sister Avdotya will fall in love with Razumikhin. You've got to know how Porfiry Petrovich will cunningly bring about Raskolnikov's confession. It deserves to be read. These people are so painfully real -- their rants, scuffles, smells, cowardice, paranoias, avarice, delusions -- all of it takes hold of you and you forgive Dostoyevsky for the "bad" writing.