I feel you on restarting Dostoevsky, was using an audiobook and a list of characters at hand to reference and it still took me six times to get started with The Brothers K, without concentration the sounds would go into my head with no comprehension. IIRC there are way too many times where the author refers to different characters with the same title, like father and son are both Prince so hearing someone speak the parts differently helps a bit. I also have to pause when French is used to translate bits or do a lookup on the text with Gutenberg and translate it.