There should be a law in Russia that if a novel is considered great enough, it should never be assigned involuntarily to schoolchildren ever again. Making 15-year-olds read a novel is a wonderful way to ensure they will not really appreciate anything in it or related to it until at least age 35, if indeed they still read by then.
On a related-unlrelated note, it has been too many years since I was in country. Which is all for the best. If I hear another ekskursovod quote two more out-of-context lines from Velikiy Pushkin, it's SIZO and Siberia for me. Out of offense for poor, dead A.S., more than anything...
I believe many of us will say that such a law should also be passed in our own countries. It's just sad how the school system destroys great works, just by virtue of making them assigned reading.
Seems I'm in the minority but I loved the literature we read in school - still remember Animal Farm, Lord of the Flies, Of Mice and Men, The Merchant of Venice, ... with great affection many years later.
I was already a prolific reader though; perhaps I had good teachers (I don't remember them as such, not bad, but not great).
That's also how I got to read Crime and Punishment twice: in Russian, when I was in school in Ukraine, and then in English, at a high school in Brooklyn the very next year. Had a blast both times, really.
Our AP English teacher that quarter was a six-foot-something metalhead whose name I, unfortunately, forgot. But his class is one of my warmest memories of those years. One time he took the whole class to a Russian restaurant (as an optional excursion, we paid for ourselves) just to give the kids a better immersion into the Russian culture (the school was right next to a Russian-speaking neighborhood anyway). Even for me, it was something that created a real-life context for the fictional work, and of course made it more exciting.
So I'd say - assigned reading is not necessarily the death knell for a work of art. It really does depend on the teacher. However, statistically, it probably kills it for most people, so in the very least, there's no point in having a nationwide standard.
Which brings me back to OP's point: the problem isn't just that there's assigned reading in ex-USSR countries, it's that everyone has the same assigned reading. That has a devastating effect, I think. At least in the US, even if a book is destroyed in the classroom, there are decent chances that most of the students won't be affected because they'll have different assigned reading.
On a related-unlrelated note, it has been too many years since I was in country. Which is all for the best. If I hear another ekskursovod quote two more out-of-context lines from Velikiy Pushkin, it's SIZO and Siberia for me. Out of offense for poor, dead A.S., more than anything...