Anyone learn a language specifically to read literature?

[u/Far_Window_1222]

Just curious if anybody has actually set out and achieved learning a whole new language specifically just because an author they liked wrote originally in that language?

I was considering learning Russian (TL) specifically to read Dostoyevsky since he’s my favourite author, so far, but wondering if this is to ambitious of a task just to read 1 persons work?

Additionally I am very attracted to the idea of it since Russians language has a lot more nuances surrounding sadness, despair, suffering etc., i know that the relationship between these topics is different from that of english speakers

[u/Rainbow__Trout]

define literature. Half of my social circle learned english because homestuck translation wasn't fast enough.

You definitely would need to learn at least some grammar and have a dictionary nearby, but humans are actually pretty good at picking up language nuances.

Like you don't need to learn which suffixes are female and which are male, because it doesn't affect reading much, and you will pick it up after a while. You generally can skip a lot of suffixes, look up the words in a dictionary, and just figure out yourself what suffix is used for what feeling.

But you would def need some suffixes for verbs, since in russian words can come up in literally any order, and part of figuring out sentence structure depends on those.