The same quality that makes Russian novels so distinctive in world literature can also transform even sensitive Anglophone readers into the boy at the back of English class who keeps asking why Hamlet doesn’t just make up his mind already. It comes down to a certain implausibility in the characters. They tend to oscillate between Dostoevskyan melodrama and inexplicable Chekhovian paralysis, both of which are frustrating to Anglo-Saxon readers for whom pragmatism and emotional continence rank among the four cardinal virtues. I confess that I have sometimes fantasized about jumping through the page and giving Ivan and Nikolai and Mitya and Katya a good shake. So has Woody Allen, if you remember Love and Death.
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