I came across a passage from The Brothers Karamazov (in an Elden Ring lore video lol) that I enjoyed so I have been considering reading it. I’m not particularly great at interpreting literature and I also read a bit slowly, so I wasn’t sure if I would be better off starting with something shorter and simpler that he wrote. The passage in the video, a conversation between Ivan and Alyosha (mostly Ivan recounting stories of the suffering of children) seemed fairly straightforward to me, but I don’t know about the rest of the book.
Also I see there are a number of different English translations available for his works, are any of them particularly good or bad?
Tangentially related, but check out Natasha, Pierre, and the Great Comet of 1812. It’s a musical that takes a chunk of ‘War and Peace’ and sets it all to music. It’s more opera than musical so you can just listen to it and get everything. I think there are maybe 2 lines of dialogue