Quote Originally Posted by Zubr
Ой, что со мной... Спасибо Оля, я стыжусь своей ошибки с «пока».
Don't. Your Russian's great. What is language learning without an occasional mistake? Though as a teacher and translator (and a perfectionist to boot) I do hate it when I do mistakes myself.
I absolutely admire you for reading Russian classics in the original. As we say here, "это вам не баран чихнул". I'm working through English classics myself but I don't do it chronologically. Just according to where my fancy leads me next. I hope to get to French lit some time soon -- Balsac, Zola, Hugo, Dumas, Jules Verne... We had a lot of French lit at the uni but I haven't read everything. Herve Bazin is the one writer that I remember really liking. And Robert Merle. But he was easy. I anticipate a lot of hard work with vocabulary -- Harry Potter and Gavalda in French is one thing, Flaubert is quite another... Anyway, reading for one's own pleasure is much more fun than doing homework. *rubbing hands in anticipation*

She made the comment that she was able to read almost anything but wasn't able to understand a simple dialogue in a film without subtitles...!
Intriguing extreme situation.
Hmm... I don't find this surprising. Listening is a very special skill, it doesn't come naturally through just "knowing" the language, it should be trained intensively. You may know the words, but won't recognise them because they're tied with other words in one quick stream of speech. You should accustom your ear to picking separate words out of that flow.
Besides, films may be harder to understand because of special vocabulary, etc. I'd say that talking to ordinary people might be easier. But you'll also need to learn lots of ordinary, everyday words, like the "(rubbish) bin"/"trash can", etc.

My concern is that the Russian grammar is so hard that it doesn't matter how good my vocabulary gets... that I'll mess up the grammar regardless.
Most likely, you'll still be understood, but yes, knowing a bit of good grammar definitely promotes understanding. As with any language, really.