Didn't see this thread before because I was out of town and off line.
First off: Don't read any book you find tedious or boring. What would be the point? I was forced to read Crime and Punishment in school and despised it. A few years later decided to try The Idiot and could not get past the first few pages. Tried again a couple of years later. On my third or fourth attempt, I picked up the book and simply could not put it down. I was completely engrossed, and loved it. All but the long and boring section where the sick kid whose name slips my mind writes his mind-numbingly dull "explanation." Later I read Crime and Punishment when I was not being forced to for class, and I enjoyed it. I absolutely loved The Brothers Karamazov.
The Idiot (Dostoyevsky) is about a young man with epilepsy who returns home to Russia after years of treatment in Switzerland. On the train going home he meets a man also returning home to claim his inheritance, who tells him a story of how he stole money from his now-deceased father to buy an extravagant gift for a beautiful woman. The lives of all three, Myshkin, the title character, who's also a prince, though princes in those days were a dime a dozen, Rogozhin, the man on the train, and Nastasya Philipovna Barashkov, the woman, become completely entangled.
I read and enjoyed War and Peace, as well as Anna Karenina. But I find the Bronte sisters incredibly dull, demonstrating that you don't have to be Russian to write dull books.
One of my favorites is Pushkin's The Queen of Spades. But I cannot read his poetry. Ask any Russian and they will tell you he's the greatest poet ever, so it's clearly that it just cannot be translated. Translation is a tricky business. I could name wonderful, marvelous books in Spanish whose English translations are unreadable.
Bottom line, there is some wonderful Russian literature, but if you force yourself to read it you'll hate it. Pick up a book and if it doesn't grab you in the first few pages put it down and try again in a couple of years.
