Where the heck were you brought up, Christopher??? How perfectly loony -- anybody who read a religious 19th-century Russian novelist was suspected of being a spy or a "commie sympathizer"? <g> (And don't blame it on the "era": I lived through that era, too.)
Anyway, you can't get out of it by complaining about Russian names. There are only three names you really need to know; Ivan, Dmitri, and Alyosha. The three brothers. Oh, yes, and Grushenka (lower-class girl friend) and Katerina Ivanovna (upper-class girl friend, hence the patronymic).
Quite seriously, you will get much, much more out of reading "The Brothers Karamazov" for the first time than out of reading Jane Austen for the fourth. For one thing, you will actually get some ideas, an area where old Jane, for all her virtues,is really not that strong. Neither is Trollope, for that matter.
Joan
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