George Orwell, a fan of outsize Russian novels, once complained that the chief impediment to reading one was that you spent the first chapter being introduced to dozens of people with triple-barrelled names whose identities and precise relation to each other you were then expected to remember for hundreds of pages at a stretch. The principal drawback to a radio dramatisation of one of these great masterpieces is that the process of recognition has to be effected by sound alone: taken off the printed page, Sergei Mikhailovich Kargarov, or whoever he may be, has nothing to conceptualise him beyond his voice.No surprise, then, to find the early sections of this 10-hour, day-long extravaganza (1 January) packed out with unobtrusively filed establishing detail. No sooner did a countess loom in