Comment by Yizahi

They are not bad. But neither they are great, just average. They are also super outdated and missing a lot of context from the time authors lived in. These books just have this fleurs exotique by the virtue of being russian and written in a very hard language for the Roman group speakers. It's a self-perpetuating self-reinforcing cycle of hype. Like a joke a about "no one was fired for ordering IBM" the same goes for the "classic" literature. No one was criticized for including Tolstoy and Dostoevsky in a 100 Best Books Of All Times list, and so they are invariably included again and again.