The Brothers Karamazov

I've been meaning to read BK for a very long time. It was one of the few Russian classics that I hadn't read. Overall, I liked it—I guess for the big ideas. The prosecutor's speech and “après moi, le déluge” in particular really resonated with me. However, BK is not very good fiction: bad pacing, turgid dialogue, horribly unrealistic women characters, and not much plot given the absurd length. There is also a lot of religious dribble, especially in the first half, which I really struggled through. In the end, I'm glad I read BK, and I would generally recommend that people read it at some point, but I doubt I'll ever pick it up again.

Re the translation: I read the Pevear & Volokhonsky translation. I appreciate that they're going for a more literal translation of the Russian. However, I found it annoying that this often resulted in English sentences that are simply ungrammatical (in the formal linguistic sense; e.g. illicit argument structure for the given predicate, violations of the anti-that-trace constraint). Why?