A fantastic achievement! Brilliant acting, especially Mironov and Inna Churikov. Olga Budina (Aglaya), Vladimir Ilyin (Lebedev), Aleksei Petrenko (General Ivolgin), and Vladimir Mashkov (Rogozhin) also give very strong performances. The masterful treatment of even the most minor characters (e.g. Yepanchin's butler) provides an incredibly rich texture for this amazing story. The main difficulty for the non-Russian speaker is the incredibly uneven quality of the English subtitles. As others have stated, the subtitles go from very good to suddenly unintelligible. In parts they annoying lag behind the dialog. The music is weak also, much of it computer-synthesized, and very repetitive. But those quibbles aside, this is a real masterpiece.
