On the question of at what age one should start to read classics: Ideally you should be very old, so you can nod in agreement with all the wisdom that the book is spreading over you. However, since there are quite a few classics, this strategy means that you will not read as many of them as you would like (at sixty-something).
It has been observed in many countries, not only Russia, that feeding lots of classics to young children seems to have an adverse effect. Yes, they look boring at that age. And remember, Dostoyevsky wrote in installments. Each chapter of a novel would be published in a magazine,  so the readers would consume the story at their leisure (if that is at all possible with a Dostoevsky story).
I only started reading Russian classics when I was 24, and by that time I had apparently gained just enough patience to accept the drawn-out descriptions and plots.
 

I forgot some resources:

George Steiner: Tolstoy or Dostoevsky. An Essay in the Old Criticism

Eelco Runia: De pathologie van de veldslag. History and Historiography in Tolstoy's War and Peace (has never been translated, AFAIK)

Что вы все только в них находите?!!!!    Это же так скучно!!!!   Das ist doch so langweilig!!!!  

It depends on my mood. If I feel idealistic, Tolstoy is my man. But when the bad stuff is hitting where it shouldn't, I tend to agree with Fjodor.

Interesting secondary literature:
Isaiah Berlin: The hedgehog and the fox. <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hedgehog_and_the_Fox">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hedgehog_and_the_Fox</a>;
Lev Shestov: "The Good in the Teaching of Tolstoy and Nietzsche" and "The Philosophy of Tragedy, Dostoevsky and Nietzsche" <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shestov">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shestov</a>;

i can't cantch ur mind,sorry)))u mean that the grassat ur neightbourt always greener?