Reading Тихий Дон (The Quiet Don)

I'm not going to bother describing Тихий Дон, but I will tell you this: I'm doing Cossacks under the Soviets research, making this book unavoidable for me, but it's easily the hardest thing I've read in Russian. It's also 1500 pages long. The characters, especially the father, speak in a weird Cossack dialect that is almost indecipherable and I'm barely plugging away at about 6 pages an hour, when I pay attention. The only thing that keeps me going is knowing that the old man is going to get killed by the Bolsheviks (that may not be true, but I'm pretty sure he'll die soon), who I pray will bring order to the novel.