Quote:
Originally Posted by dreams
It was a translated work (not all works translate over well) and I don't have a lot of knowledge of the Russian culture and that time period.
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I think both of these were significant factors in my reaction. At one point, I decided largely to avoid translated works, because IMO they almost never are successful. But I know it can't be helped, and for critical works a translation (even only adequate) is vastly preferable to not knowing it at all.
I know the second affected me a lot. For this category I nominated the first Palliser novel by Trollope (zero interest, lol!) and it would have been approximately the same time period. But I'm reasonably familiar with English politics and culture of the mid-19th century and I know I would have been fascinated by the minutia that fleshed out my understanding. My eyes wouldn't have glazed over as they did with Levin's agricultural theories, since all I know about that time period in Russia is that Alexander II had freed the serfs and their lot worsened in the short term.
You make a good point about serialization. It was typical of those doorstop Victorian novels, but it presents problems with the structure when read as a whole. One of my objections was the anti-climax of Levin's religious conversion, instead of ending the book with Anna's suicide. But the Levin bit was added later (a mistake, IMO) when it didn't make it into the original release.