This book brings together Virginia Woolf's essays and book reviews on Russian literature; her unpublished reading notes on Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Chekhov, and Turgenev; and new and insightful scholarly commentary concerning her response to each of the major Russian writers.
Definitely worth reading before reading any form of Russian literature, it discusses the knowledge lost and changed through translation and how Dostoevsky and Tolstoy explore the soul in a raw and forceful way.