Russian Classics in Russian and English: Learn Russian with Dostoevsky (Russian Edition)

I'm an advanced student of Russian. I love the concept of side-by-side bilingual texts as a study aid to reading a foreign language, and have used them as part of my study program for several languages. However, I have to take issue with the decision to devote one-third of the space in the book to a transliteration of the Russian text (in latin alphabet). It seems like this must have been done as a marketing ploy directed at those who have yet to begin studying Russian. A beginner looking at Russian is usually dismayed by the new alphabet he/she's going to have to learn, and thinks that this is going to be THE big stumbling block to learning Russian. Students of Russian who've advanced beyond that, however, will reassure you that it's not that big a deal (a mere anthill compared to the complexities and daunting challenges to come in studying Russian - don't get me started on THAT!) I would strongly encourage the beginning student NOT to go down the stupid road of depending on a transliteration as a crutch - that way lies madness! You'd just be spinning your wheels and putting off the inevitable... Instead, just bite the bullet, get down to learning the cyrillic alphabet, and soon you'll have that behind you.So including the transliteration amounts to one-third of the book being wasted space. That said, I downloaded the text of the free sample of the text from the Facebook page, and it looks good, and is nicely designed - including the accent marks on the Russian text is a great idea, as is including the vocabulary list. So I think this would be an excellent aid to learning to read Russian.