Russian is not easy to self-teach, is it? I took two semesters just before we adopted a 7 year old child from Russia back in 1995. I am planning to begin study again in the fall along with my two oldest children, from a woman at church who just completed her degree in Russian Language.
The book is very enjoyable, and let me know if you read it. When they find the family one of the first things the father asks is who the current Czar is. That's how isolated they were and for how long they were outside of any contact with society.
It is a difficult language for me. The spelling of those long words is totally confounding, also those ibles or whatever those funny symbols are. It's been several years since I worked with it. I took quite a bit of teasing about it from my family because I was listening to all those strange sounds on my tape recorder instead of doing something normal like FR :-).