13 ms·
I was blown away by Crime and Punishment. I truly felt like I was the main character, and I read it with feverish sweat and dread for my impending doom. I crin
by SugarReflex 3mo ago
I was blown away by Crime and Punishment.
I truly felt like I was the main character, and I read it with feverish sweat and dread for my impending doom. I cringed and felt terrible sadness at the poor little lives of certain individuals. So much woe and tragedy.
I was glad to see how it turned out though.
I'm currently reading Karamazov and it's good to have something a bit more jovial and dry witted.
The main difficulty is the names. The names make it so hard.
I love the Space Trilogy by Lewis but I lose my place when he describes a place. Dostoevsky is better at describing people (and bringing them to life in your mind) than Lewis is at describing a landscape.
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- mrexroad 3mo agoSimilar, read Crime and Punishment earlier this year and it took me a few pages to realize two different names were the same character. Felt silly when I realized lol. Also just started Brothers Karamazov, but decided to switch translations and am waiting for new copy to arrive.
- alexey-salmin 3mo agoA thought but maybe switch to the Idiot instead. I think of all the Dostoyevsky works the Brothers is the least enjoyable one. Keep it to the end or else it may suffocate your interest and prevent you from reading some of his greater works.
- Forgeties79 3mo agoNothing silly about it. That’s a very common thing people have to get used to with Russian literature. People have several names they go by as well as nickname variations of those names, and different people based on familiarity will use different ones. So you can have a single character referred to by 3-4 different names in a single work! It also doesn’t help if one of their nicknames resembles somebody else’s name lol
- chistev 3mo agoI've tried Crime and Punishment like three times but always stopped at some point because I wasn't feeling it. Maybe I'll give it another go.
- brotchie 3mo agoTry a different translation. First time I started to read it, it was a slog and I didn’t get far. Did a bit of research on translations and chose another one (can’t recall the exact translator). The 2nd attempt’s translation used more contemporary language, which made it much more understandable and got through it.
- foretop_yardarm 3mo agoIf you are going to read in English, I can recommend the translation by Oliver Ready
- UncleOxidant 3mo agoRead Crime and Punishment ~25 years ago, the Idiot ~20 years ago. I read Karamazov last year and Demons early this year. I still think C&P is the best of his books with Karamazov a close 2nd. Demons is very dark, but also it seems prophetic - it's like he foresaw some of what would happen in 1917 way back in 1870. He's even got a character in there that's short and bald and likes to wave his arms around wildly as he's speaking, whipping the crowd into a frenzy - sounds a lot like Lenin who was born about the time Demons was written. Still, I wouldn't have made it through Demons if I hadn't read it in an online book group where once a week we met to discuss.
- 6LLvveMx2koXfwn 3mo agoI'm an Idiot man, myself
- eager_learner 3mo agohave you tried 'A hero of our time' by Lermontov. Upon reading it, I felt really sorry the author died an early death. I have not felt like that about any other European author.
- orthoxerox 3mo ago> I felt really sorry the author died an early death. Everyone who knew Lermonotov personally thought Michel was a massive asshole. His biggest hobbies were destroying existing relationships by seducing the women and badmouthing everyone in his vicinity.
- eager_learner 3mo agoEh... I don't think a man capable of such poetry to be that asshole. He says as much in the second preface. I think he may have used the narrator in the first part of the novel as his own mouthpiece.
- S_Bear 3mo agoOne of my all-time favorites. Still reads like a 'modern' book.
- dub4u 3mo agoThe name problem totally disappears when you use any e-reader's built-in search on the highlighted name
- Oreb 3mo agoNot really. The problem with the names in Dostoyevsky (and Russian literature more generally) isn’t that the names on their own are difficult to remember, it is that all names also have familiar forms, which are sometimes very different from the formal name. On page you get introduced to a character named Alexander, a few pages later the text talks about Sasha. For non-native speakers, it’s hard to guess that it’s the same person. An e-reader’s search function isn’t going to make this problem disappear.
- orthoxerox 3mo ago> For non-native speakers, it’s hard to guess that it’s the same person. Like "Mrs. Thatcher", "Margaret" and "Peg"?
- kelnos 3mo agoI think Robert and Bob are better examples. Native English speakers of all ages today are going to know that they're the same person, but someone in Russia might have trouble with those names if they were to read a Russian translation of an English novel. (My first grade teacher in the 80s was named Margaret, but went by Peg with her students' parents, so I know this one. I wouldn't fault most native English speakers under the age of 35 or so if they didn't know it.)
- Forgeties79 3mo agoMore like “Richard” and “Dick.” You have to be explicitly told that Dick is a nickname for Richard at some point in your life or you’d likely never figure it out.
- sumeno 3mo agoI mean, yeah, if I wasn't a native speaker I'd find those confusing, especially Margaret and Peg
- asimovDev 3mo agoCrime and Punishment is one of the very few school curriculum mandatory books that I enjoyed reading and actively got ahead of the required per week pages.
- davidwritesbugs 3mo agoSame. Then I tried to read Brothers karamazov, “ooof”, it literally took 200 pages before I stopped hating the ‘pointless’ book with its plot that went nowhere. Then I got it. Only certain authors can do this I reckon, but how you’d get a doom-scrolling teenager to do it? Goooood luck.
- Forgeties79 3mo agoI have tried to break into the brothers K two or three times and it’s just been so difficult for some reason. I know it’s kind of a joke at this point, but keeping track of all of the names is just so dizzying and distracting.
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- hk__2 3mo agoI read War and Peace recently, is it the same amount of characters? At some point I almost started a genealogical tree of the characters.
- fleebee 3mo agoRegarding Brothers, I don't think it's that much more than the average novel of that length. What I think trips foreign readers up the most is the constant use of Russian diminutive names e.g. substituting Alyosha for Alexei or Mitenka for Dmitri.
- notpushkin 3mo agoI wonder if replacing those with more modern/“western” diminutives would help with that and whether it would hurt the writing style too much. It will definitely lack the vibe, but if you can’t read it otherwise, maybe it’s better than nothing? E.g. Dima (widely used in modern Russian, and it’s clear that it’s short for Dmitry) instead of Mitenka or Alex instead of Alyosha (Lyosha is commonly used in Russian, but Alex would be easier to make a mental connection... until you have an Alexander and have to shorten that to Sasha; that one is probably a more widely known diminutive though)
- sevenzero 3mo agoI read it in the hopes of finding a written character I could relate to, but the dude in Crime and Punishment is just such a massive loser... I lack empathy too, but I would never murder anyone out of pity.
- Dilettante_ 3mo agoLook at this hotshot who can't relate to massive losers! /j
- sevenzero 3mo agoFair :D
- Forgeties79 3mo agoI read Crime & Punishment in high school and I was also blown away at how good it was. I did that teenage thing where I had a brief interest in “reading classics,” and found everything to be a little dense and full of “it’s something to appreciate not enjoy” energy. But not Crime & Punishment. That was a real page turner. Also, who doesn’t love Razumikhin?
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- orthoxerox 3mo ago> The main difficulty is the names. The names make it so hard. What's wrong with the names? I find Chinese novels much harder to read because everyone's named C{V[n[g]]|ei|ao|ou} C{V[n[g]]|ei|ao|ou}C{V[n[g]]|ei|ao|ou}.
- kelnos 3mo agoI haven't read any Dostoyevsky since high school, and don't remember it at all, but I'd imagine it has to do with nicknames. A non-Russian speaker is going to be confused when the same character is referred to as both Alexander and Sasha, for example, and will think they're different people.
- kgeist 3mo agoI think it's the translators' fault. I think they could've added some footnotes like *Sasha - diminutive of Alexander.
- nephihaha 3mo agoI've never understood this particular issue. My mother had it too with Russian literature. Many Russian books have a "cast list" at the beginning to get round this. I don't find it any stranger than William being called Will, Wullie, Bill or Billy; or Robert turning into Rob, Robbie, Rab, Bert, Bob or Bobby; or Elizabeth being turned into Liz, Lizzy, Beth, Betty, Liza, Lilbet etc. I found most Russian diminutives are formulaic so I picked them up fast.
- NorthSouthNorth 3mo agoYeah, it's easy once you pick up the formula, but for first-time readers, it's hard. My first piece of russian literature was The Idiot, and I remember consulting the front page quite often. There are lots of similar names, and the seemingly random use of full names, first names, last names and nicknames, throws off new readers. There are also just a lot of characters.
- simiones 3mo ago
- throw0101d 3mo ago> The main difficulty is the names. The names make it so hard. If you really want a challenge, try the Malazan series: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malazan_Book_of_the_Fallen https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malazan_Book_of_the_Fallen
- Yizahi 3mo agoHeh, I find the downvotes for the above comment amusing. 100% expected, but amusing. It would be pretty interesting to hear someone rationalize precisely why for example Deadhouse Gates is a worse book than Crime and Punishment :) . At a guess, I would expect descriptors like non-serious (unlike serious C&P), a lowly fiction fantasy (unlike a documentary C&P, heh), suffering used as a vulgar shock content (unlike being a masterful depiction of a soul's torment in C&P), banal themes of isolation used as a dumb plot device (unlike Raskolnikov's isolation being a brilliant metaphor for an agonizing human psyche), a chaotic cacophony of disjointed narratives and different points of view (unlike a beautiful orchestrated suite of intertwining and supporting themes in C&P), a mindless pulp suitable for teenagers (and an intellectual feast for a curious mind hungry for a proper stimulation in a sea of drivel, in C&P).
- djyde 3mo agoI only had the patience to read long books in high school; now I really want to but they're too difficult.
- j_bum 3mo agoHave you tried audiobooks?
- waltbosz 3mo agoI found this Librivox audiobook to have a good narrator. https://librivox.org/crime-and-punishment-version-3-by-fyodor-dostoyevsky/ https://librivox.org/crime-and-punishment-version-3-by-fyodo...
- Rendello 3mo agoI listened to the first third of the book while at work (the second Librivox version) [1]. I'm not sure if he pronounced the names right, because I've heard others pronounce them differently, and I'm not sure who's correct. In any case, having listened to the names, I found it quite easy to read the rest of the physical book, having the pronunciation and prosody of many the names already embedded in me. Having multiple names per person was quite confusing, still. https://librivox.org/crime-and-punishment-version-2-by-fyodor-dostoyevsky/ https://librivox.org/crime-and-punishment-version-2-by-fyodo...
- throw4847285 3mo agoYou just have to build a habit. Nothing happens unless it becomes habitual. Of course, that "just" is doing a lot. I'm saying it's doable, not that it's easy.
- __rito__ 3mo ago> The main difficulty is the names. The names make it so hard. I think that's an exciting part. When I am bored with names of similar kind, the names make the characters somewhat exotic. I don't know about you, but the name "Grushenka" adds to everything that is going on with that woman.
- selicos 3mo agoIn my experience it's more the Russian diminutives across the language that cause issues. If you're familiar with the nickname variations then it's easy to follow. If you aren't you'll be taking notes and looking up why Vladimir is called Vova or Volodya, or why Anna becomes Anya or Ayn. It takes an adjustment or familiarity.
- __rito__ 3mo agoAgree with that. But I also meant full-names. With so many Williams, Johns, Franks, Bens, etc. reading a novel with exotic names is just breath of fresh air. Also feel the same when watching non-English modern TV/web series. Like Nordic or Spanish stuff.
- Markoff 3mo agosame here, I remember it vividly reading while backpacking in my 3USD Bangkok guesthouse 20 years ago if if would be mandatory school reading I would probably enjoy it much less from classics I can recommend also 1984, Animal Farm and Catch XXII (if you served in army you will have better appreciation for it, it was exactly describing absurd situations happening when I served)
- Insanity 3mo agoI was never in the army, and I still enjoyed and would recommend Catch 22 regardless. It (sadly) applies to the goofiness of companies and bureaucracies more broadly. That said, being in the army might add an additional level of apprecation but it's a good book regardless.
- mynegation 3mo agoAs a Russian native speaker, names were not the problem, but the dense boring prose of Dostoyevsky was. On top of this, I did not like Crime and Punishment at all. I believe a lot of it has to do with the degree of association of the reader with the main character. As a 14 year old, I could not understand what the whole fuss is about, the whole thing felt like a feverish dream in the pool of molasses.
- cambaceres 3mo ago[dead]
- Cpoll 3mo agoReading Crime and Punishment gave me anxiety, I had to put it down.