The piece of art the gave me that feeling is the movie Taxy driver.

A great, disturbingly accurate, representation of what happens when loneliness starts to eat away at a person's mind.

I enjoyed Crime and Punishment for similar reasons. Tolstoy was masterful at engaging the reader in the mind of an unsteady protagonist.

I just finished reading Crossroads, a new novel by Franzen. There are some similarities you might like. No murder, but Franzen has gotten quite good at inhabiting the mind of unsteady, sometimes unwell characters.

You probably mean War and Peace. You are right, it is an excellent book.

Sorry, brain fart on Tolstoy/Dostoevsky. Though yes War and Peace I really enjoyed as well. I don't fully agree with him on his absolute takedown of the 'great man theory' in W&P, but it's an incredible story.

I actually think he has a point with the great man theory. What we call a great man is a carefully engineered product and is the result of work of many people. A Steve Jobs or a Napoleon is a head node of a massive computing cluster. Is someone like that necessary? Of course. Would they be powerful at all without all the resources behind them? Not really. And this is sort of what I took away from W&P: Napoleon was a product of his time, and due to circumstances people happened to connect themselves into this giant borg with Napoleon at the helm.

I think I agree with you, but my reading of Tolstoy was that his position was more absolutist: the Great Man didn't matter at all, and someone else would be in his place if he wasn't there and that person would make the same decisions with the same results. His metaphor was a herd of sheep that wandered randomly this way and that, and that through the lens of history we look at whichever sheep was at the leading edge of the direction the herd was moving at the time as a "great leader," because the rest of the sheep seemed to be following that sheep.

I do agree that we make a "Great Man" to be much more than they are: that the achievements we ascribe to them would be impossible without support, work, and desire by a great number of people for the thing the leader wants to do, and that this leader can't unilaterally substantially change the course of history without immense support.

Where I disagree is the idea that that person is completely inconsequential; that a similar person would rise just the same, given the circumstances of the time, and that the results would be of no difference.

I'm open to the idea that Tolstoy was just taking an absolutist approach as a method of rhetoric and that he didn't actually believe that leaders have no consequence.

Another excellent book that injects you into an unstable protagonist is Fyodor Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground. Can be read in a day. Highly recommend. This was my first intro to Russian lit.

At the time I read it, I found myself hating the book and its characters, yet unable to put it down. It wasn't until long after I had finished the book that I realized that there were no novels that had ever made me actually feel such strong emotions before, and that's precisely what makes it a masterpiece. I ended up reading the rest of his major works, and to this day I don't think any other author I've read can compare in terms of getting inside your head.