I think a lot of americans enter adulthood only exposed to "classics" as older english-language works. The prose and especially dialog in those doesn't flow naturally to contemporary english speakers so feels a little difficult or stilted. Familiarity with it needs to be earned before making confident aesthetic judgements.

For the russian classics the translation trend for decades has been a little more terse and less ornate sentence-by-sentence. Which I think flows naturally and makes it feel more modern to contemporary english speakers. This often surprises people! But the russian classics can be a more fun, modern-feeling read than the english ones.

It's one of the advantages of translated works. They can be continually retranslated into the target language as its vernacular and cadence changes. Same-language works are stuck forever with the dialect of the time, and "paraphrases" into modern vernacular are met with much more skepticism than new translations are.

I didn’t say I didn’t think it would be well written, I just didn’t expect it to be as good as I found it to be. I had just been reading “Paradise Lost” and found “Crime and Punishment” written so well (not that PL isn’t) and in such an approachable way (PL certainly isn’t very approachable) that I couldn’t stop. Often with classic literature I get bogged down with flowery language, what seems like over emphasis on points, or dialogues that seem to stretch for eternity. Especially classic European literature with their “classic” translations. Often I push through those points and am rewarded by that, but with “Crime and Punishment” I felt almost no friction while reading, which was a surprise to me because I often do feel that friction with classic literature. I hope that answers your question.

I am not being cynical either, but have you read this thread? Or any thread on books on this site? 90% are SF/fantasy or books about CS (90% written by American/British authors), most (not all) people in tech have very mediocre taste in literature and in non-fiction books outside of technology. You rarely would see here people recommending Orhan Pamuk,Javier Marias, Dino Buzzati,Amos Oz,WG Sebald or Naguib Mahfouz, just to give examples of very famous novelists totally ignored here. For every 100 mentions of total mediocrities like Mark Manson, Ryan Holiday or Simon Sinek you would be lucky to find 1 mention of people like Ha-Joon Chang,Leszek Kolakowski or Peter Sloterdijk.