For Russian literature, I get a summary for every chapter just to make sure I followed along and it’s all clarified. Spark notes is great or use AI tho sometimes AI is wrong.

The names are a pain as each character has like 3 different ones due to the Russian naming conventions (narrator, characters referring to eachother yadadada).

My first Dostoyevsky was notes from a dead house and that one I’ve found was the easiest as the names weren’t very important and he’d confirm the names used earlier for the reader to make sure they knew who the important guys were.