Dostoyevsky isn't difficult
autodidacts.io229 points by surprisetalk 3 days ago
229 points by surprisetalk 3 days 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.
> 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.
In 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.
> 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}.
I think the problem with Russian names in particular is that a Russian name has three parts (e.g. Nikolai Ivanovich Lobachevsky) and different parts get used in different contexts, depending on who's speaking, level of familiarity and so on. So it's like in an English novel where someone might be referred to as Smith by the narrator but John in dialogue, but with an extra 50%, at least, of confusion.
There are also the "canonical" nicknames that are not obvious to non-Russian speakers. E.g. Nikolai is Kolja.
With different transliteration that one at least makes sense. Nikolay = Kolya. But one that'll send most non-Russian speakers for a loop is Alexander = Sasha. It's like Richard = Dick, though there there's at least a rule that makes that one make sense (a rhyme with a shortened name so Richard -> Rick -> Dick, William -> Will -> Bill, etc). I wonder why it didn't just end up as Lexa, which would fit the other patterns for Russian names/diminutives.
The "-sha" pattern is relatively consistent: Pavel-Pasha, Mikhail-Misha, Natalya-Natasha, Nikolay-Nikolasha, Alexey-Alyosha, Mariya-Masha, Ilya-Ilyusha.
So, Aleksandr-Aleksasha. The dropping of "Alek" is the only inconsistent part, on par with Agrippina-Agrusha-Grusha.
Interesting, never heard 'Nikolasha' once
> Interesting, never heard 'Nikolasha' once
It's archaic, used in Peter I times. Modern one is Kolya
Lexa (to be more precise, Lyoha) is a shortened version of Alexey (Aleksei); but if it wasn't reserved for that, Lyoha sounds a bit rude (and a more gentle version akin to Sasha would be Lyosha).
> I wonder why it didn't just end up as Lexa
One of the potential diminuitives for "Aleksandr" is indeed "Lesha", although I think it's more common as a diminuitive for "Aleksei"?
Russian diminutives, making nicknames much harder to track for those not familiar with the culture and language. Vladimir is Vova is Volodya, same person. Then other parts of their full name may have variations depending on use.
And then we add the diminutives like Kolichka. Though, admittedly, there's much more of a pattern there.
> So it's like in an English novel where someone might be referred to as Smith by the narrator but John in dialogue, but with an extra 50%, at least, of confusion.
I've been reading Tom Clancy recently, and that's basically the Jack Ryan books. Somehow, "Jack" is actually a nickname for "John".
> Somehow, "Jack" is actually a nickname for "John".
That has never made one iota of sense to me. The whole "Dick" / "Richard" thing makes more sense than "Jack" / "John" to me (and it's nonsensical, too).
Wow, until this moment I didn’t realize that Lloyd Bentsen was talking about John F. Kennedy when he said “senator, you’re no Jack Kennedy” to Dan Quayle! I was born in the mid 80s so it was just a quote I’d heard as a child and never thought of it much but thank you.
It's nonsensical unless we are seeing the "John (projectname)" meme in real life. "John" gets used as a placeholder, it gets Ctrl+F replaced in the final draft but Ctrl+F misses the spot with the formal variation, somebody pretends it was intentional, and now contradicting it is a loss of face so the name sticks. The process has given birth to another accidental John.
According to Wikipedia:
- Jehan (Old French form of "John") -> Jan
- Jan -> Jankin (diminutive)
- Jankin -> Jackin
- Jackin -> Jack
No doubt there are "reasons" for all of them, but it's so far in the past and so far removed from my cultural experience as to be irrelevant and functionally nonsensical.
This does give me a reason to preserve some fact about one of my favorite cats ever in perpetuity (given the similarity of the John / Jack transition to Joe the Cat's life).
A friend's cat (who I knew as Joe the Cat) went from being called "Ivy" to "Joe" over the course of the cat's 15+ year lifetime by way of being called, successively: Ivy --> Jivey --> Jive --> Java --> Joe
Joe was calm and compliant, and arguably "a good kitty" (albeit I only knew him late in his life). My friend once described Joe as being more frantic in his youthful vigor but being "pacified through years of routine and systematic abuse".
No, my friend and his and his family didn't actually abuse Joe the Cat. He was much loved. I get to use the phrase "years of routine and systematic abuse" in my life (as often as possible!) now, though (often referring to my experiences with various pieces of software).
I've not read Dostoevsky, but there is a similar issue in Japanese literature. The same person might be referred to in as many as 4 different ways, and on top of that you are supposed to infer who the speaker is by the mode of address (and other context clues like personal pronouns), so dialog tags are seldom used.
I'm bad with names to begin with, so I usually make a chart to keep side characters straight.
The same thing happens in English literature of Dostoevsky's period - upper class characters might be referred to by substantive title (sometimes in two different forms), subsidiary title, courtesy title, surname, first name, job/rank/office, epithet, nickname, or even pet name.
To add confusion, the choice of which to use is usually context-dependent (time period, age, status, situation, relationship between characters) but sometimes the author will switch between, say, title and surname within the same paragraph simply as a matter of style or to avoid repetition.
The obscure Russian nicknames! How is anybody supposed to know without being told that Sasha and Alexander are the same guy? (I do realize that while some English nicknames like Johnny for John are pretty self-explanatory, other like Jack for John or Dick for Richard are as opaque to foreigners as Alexander/Sasha)
I was in my 20's when I realized Bill and William are the same name
I read a lot of Enid Blyton in my youth; by ten I know bill/william and richard/dick, etc.
My wife had a grandfather with the first name Bill and middle William. After 12 years together, I'm still not sure if she's just messing with me.
Sasha and Alexander isn't that obscure thought. Very common example The real obscure diminutive for Alexander is Shura :D
The first time I worked with Polish people I had this problem a lot until I noticed the pattern. Someone told me to go and talk to "Maciek", it was only on asking Maciej where to find him that I found out they were the same person
Here there is at least same prefix.
Only issue I recall might be with female Aleksandra (abbreviated to Ola) and male Aleksander (abbreviated to Olo, or Olek).
Others usually (if I remember correctly) have similar prefix.
The dialectal form Aleksasha (following the common pattern Mariya > Masha, Pavel > Pasha, etc.) might reduce the confusion somewhat.
> Jack for John
Wow, is this one common?
Traditionally, yes; these days, perhaps not so much.
The author Jack London was originally John London. John F. Kennedy was familiarly known as Jack ("Senator, you're no Jack Kennedy"). The British racing driver John Stewart is far more commonly known as Jackie Stewart. In Patrick O'Brian's naval fiction, Captain John Aubrey is almost always referred to as Jack.
I 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.
Sasha may also refer to Alexandra, which is a feminine first name. What's more, there's like a ton of diminutive short names for these -- my first ever instagram link on HN, but: https://www.instagram.com/reel/DTUeNn7iAit/
(FWIW, it lists: Sasha, Sashka, Sashulya, Sashenka, Sanya, Sanechka, Sancho, San, Shurik, Sashunya, Sanyusha, Sanyok. I myself have heard native Russians use Sash - should be written as Сашь -, and e.g. Mish - Мишь -, which is a similar "lazy" conversational short form for Misha/Mikhail.
I've learned some Russian, and once you start sensing the endless magic they can do with verb prefixes and sufixes, you realize what a versatile language this is. Somewhat the same counts for first names, I guess.)
> Сашь -, and e.g. Mish - Мишь
Note: these are written without soft sign a the end: Саш, Миш.
I think it's the translators' fault. I think they could've added some footnotes like *Sasha - diminutive of Alexander.
This could be an LLM based e-reader feature, replace names with non-native intelligible translations.
I'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.
I don't think it's conceptually difficult, it's just hard (for some of us, at least) to remember the names of a culture you haven't been exposed to. I speak a language with slavonic influence, so I didn't have this problem with Russian literature, but I remember vividly how hard it was to remember the names of characters in the first anime I watched, just because I was so unaccostemed to Japanese names (even though they were clearly very distinctive).
The recall of words you aren't familiar with tends to be pretty poor. This is also visible in how hard it can be to build vocabulary when learning a new language, and how you can completely mix up words at that stage - there's nothing about names that makes this any easier.
If I hadn't grown up hearing those nicknames I would find them confusing as well. It's not natural for a non-native speaker to figure out Dunya, Dunechka, and Avdotya are the same person.
Similarly, Dmitri Prokofych Razumikhin is referred to as Razumikhin 95% of the time, then suddenly people are referring to Dimitry Prokofych and I've got to look up who that is.
Yeah, 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.
As 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.
Same. 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.
Any teenager IMO. I sometimes wonder how I got through high school English. Whether it was The Great Gatsby or Candide or King Lear or The Crucible or Moby Dick it was all so tedious and utterly, utterly boring. And this was well before the internet; home computers were just starting to become popular but almost nobody was online yet.
I did find Vonnegut and a small handful of others to be more engaging.
I 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.
I read War and Peace recently, is it the same amount of characters? At some point I almost started a genealogical tree of the characters.
Regarding 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.
I 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)
In the French translation of War and Peace I read, the first use of every diminutive had a footnote explaining who was that person.
The edition I read had a map of characters at the beginning which was helpful
I only had the patience to read long books in high school; now I really want to but they're too difficult.
Have you tried audiobooks?
I found this Librivox audiobook to have a good narrator.
https://librivox.org/crime-and-punishment-version-3-by-fyodo...
I 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-fyodo...
You 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.
Similar, 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.
A 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.
Nothing 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
Read 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.
have 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.
> 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.
Crime 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.
The name problem totally disappears when you use any e-reader's built-in search on the highlighted name
Not 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.
> For non-native speakers, it’s hard to guess that it’s the same person.
Like "Mrs. Thatcher", "Margaret" and "Peg"?
I 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.)
I mean, yeah, if I wasn't a native speaker I'd find those confusing, especially Margaret and Peg
More 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.
> The main difficulty is the names. The names make it so hard.
If you really want a challenge, try the Malazan series:
I 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?
I'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.
Try 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.
If you are going to read in English, I can recommend the translation by Oliver Ready
same 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)
I 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.
I 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.
As a Russian native speaker who graduated from the high school in Russia many years ago, one thing that I don't really understand is why these great works of Russian literature are included in the school must read list. An average teenager, myself included, always has some better things to do than reading a huge novel, barely understanding characters' motivations, because neither of these books were ever intended for teens.
Those who find time later in their adult life will re-read the classics and appreciate it, but many will not, and that's probably a result of forcing the kids to deal with something most of them are not ready for.
>An average teenager, myself included, always has some better things to do than reading a huge novel, barely understanding characters' motivations, because neither of these books were ever intended for teens.
Bookish teens have been reading these books since they came out.
And the average teenager has way worse things to do than reading a classic novel.
As for "barely understanding characters' motivations" that's how you understand characters motivations, and literature in general, by getting into even without understand it at first. That's true in almost every field in life.
Bookish teens will read them anyway.
Giving them the option to do so in school, I would imagine would be met thankfully by them if done well, and a "no thanks" from the less-bookish - who very possibly will go on to read them later on in life.
> Giving them the option to do so in school
Isn't that exactly the idea? Ask everyone to spend time reading a book is a way to give them time to do it. So that some may discover they are bookish. As for the others, it doesn't exactly hurt to try.
Part of the point of school however is to not let teenagers just learn only what they care about, because most of them don't care about anything except consuming and gaming and media slop.
Isn’t that the purpose of school? To make kids try and expand their thinking to think about things they don’t think about in normal life. A normal average teen does not think about chemistry, math, physics either. Will everything stick? Probably not. But some might stick for some students and that’s better than just giving up and only teaching teens about things average teens are naturally interest in (sex education?)
The comment you're responding to is talking about books that students will "barely understand". You're talking about subjects teens aren't interested in. The comment above says nothing about interest and specifically does not advocate against teaching things to teens just because they aren't interested in them; only if they won't understand them.
Even if you don't fully understand it the first time around, these are cultural reference points, so at least when you hear someone reference them, you'll have an idea what they are talking about and can get the point of what the adults are talking about. Then later if you ever read it again, you also have a better understanding of its place and get a better second pass understanding.
There is also the role of simply communicating to the next generation that society values these books, and they are important for some reason. Even if you only get one shallow layer of meaning at the time. Same with history and everything else. It's a time to get a first taste of what these things feel like.
>The comment you're responding to is talking about books that students will "barely understand".
That's how you get to understand something you "barely understand". You dive into it, and gradually you understand it better.
I understood classic novels in high school just fine. Further experience reveals more layers, but you still get lots of life lessons, and poetic moments, and better grasp of people and life, and introduction into a culture that's not just consuming slop, from reading them as a teenager.
There's a difference between teaching kids stuff they aren't interested in in order to expose them to it (good!), and teaching kids stuff that require the lived experience of an adult to truly understand and appreciate (of dubious utility!).
Even more so, I feel it's outright counter productive since it's not uncommon for kids to start hating book reading because of the impression these mandatory reads leave.
The two main purposes of school are to provide day care for workers' children and inculcating obedience to authority.
Yes it’s an interesting question and applies to many books chosen for teenagers in school.
Technically they can handle the text and it may improve their reading and writing, I assume this is the justification for setting these texts.
Emotionally and socially they are nowhere near ready to deal with Dostoyevsky’s nihilism and angst and Austen’s witty social comedy of manners about a situation young girls no longer find themselves in.
Compared to Dickens or Shakespeare for example though they are unlikely to engage teenagers and very likely to actively put them off reading.
One of the amusing things from reading Wodehouse school stories - the kids were avoiding Latin by hiding Dickens inside their books.
Today kids hide comics inside books to avoid Dickens; someday kids will hide something new inside books to avoid the mandatory comic reading.
Not sure about Shakespeare. We suffered through Shakespeare in both English and Drama classes. I'm not sure that improved my appreciation. Other things did. I had to learn to love Shakespeare otherwise.
I watched "Hamnet" last night, which was okay, but I dread to think what that film would have been like if I was made to watch it at school.
If it’s taught well I think it can be very entertaining. There are lots of levels to Shakespeare and lots of very basic comedy. Watchman in Macbeth etc. the motives of characters are also explained well.
The only problem is the language.
I haven't read much of Shakespeare, but the lightbulb moment for me personally was the 1996 "Romeo + Juliet" movie with DiCaprio. The modern contextualization makes it so much easier to parse the period dialogue.
I think Shakespeare might just be a badly chosen set of "classics". Romeo and Juliet is so overdone in pop culture there's nothing interesting there, and the one or two others we had to read were just boring. But then I ran across Much Ado About Nothing (while still in school) and remember it being actually good.
> Romeo and Juliet is so overdone in pop culture there's nothing interesting there
The whole point is to read the actual primary text that has been so done, re-done, overdone. And hopefully to recognize there's some real beauty and drama in there
This is a conundrum to me. I was a pretty bookwormish youngster and read a lot of classics. Often I had to push myself through works like Crime and Punishment but I felt like it was good for me. I’m glad I exercised the muscle of reading, but now I can understand that those books just don’t hit like they should when you don’t have the life experience to understand them. Something like Ulysses is still difficult, but at mid life you can really get it.
Would I rather have waited until 35? No, but I’ll probably go back and reread a lot of those books I read when I was younger.
Crime and Punishment is mild compared to something like Law and Peace or Anna Karenina.
That's a fair point. I read The Idiot in high school, when I was 14 years old, for an assignment. (I don't think I specifically had to read that book, but we were asked to pick from a list, and I picked that one.) I had so much trouble getting through it, and while I had the impression that the writing was brilliant, I wasn't educated or mature enough at that point to appreciate it or even understand many of the themes in the book.
I was generally an avid reader as a child, regularly blowing through the (age appropriate) summer reading lists every year as far back as I can remember, and then finding new things to read. During the school year when I had a 9pm bedtime, I would regularly bring a flashlight to bed, pull my blankets over my head, and read until much later. But The Idiot was tough, and I don't think teens should read books like that.
I've considered re-reading it as an adult, but I still have some scars from my first read-through, even if those scars aren't fair to the material at all.
One big problem in terms of "bad experience" is that in addition to reading the book itself, you're being graded on a specific kind of understanding of the book, which you then need to communicate to the teacher and the teacher needs to agree. The process transforms something that should be entertaining and edifying, into a combined dread / chore (especially if high grades are needed for life plans). Man I hated English class.
I think it takes a very specific kind of person to read Crime and Punishment.
So, as a baseline, I think most people have or can understand internal monologues. That's not what I mean, though that is a prerequisite.
But many real-life people, especially those that have gone through phases in their life where they were Raskilnikov (not criminals, not necessarily egomaniacs, but the whole melodramatic shut in deal) would tell you that they both understand Raskilnikov type people and would tell them to shut up.
For me, it was honestly a bit depressing. Raskilnikov reminded me of me in my worst moments. Honestly, a lot of the characters did. Having these strong, abstract, high and lofty ideals is contrasted against the real, practical characters like Rahmuzkhin. Every single one of the lofty idealists (besides maybe the full commune living guy - what he says is weird, but not his actions) is contrasted with the people on the ground, doing good work. Even Sonya - she's devout, but not so devout as to become a pastor, abstractly preaching about goodness and kindness, but blind to the suffering around her.
And isn't that what the lesson is at the end of the book, anyways? (trying to be vague to avoid spoilers).
Though it's not like just "doing good work" will bring you the sort of the "ultimate" that many of these characters seemed to have wanted. Once you try to formalize it and intellectualize it, you can point to how Crime and Punishment is such an illogical novel. And yet it feels so real.
Ah whatever. Enough armchairing from me :)
Only one or two of Russian classics were obligatory in Serbia high-schools — yet I devoured them all (esp Dostoeyvsky, Bulgakov, Gogol... Tolstoy a bit less so).
I am sure I'd find them different if I re-read them, but I could relate to characters and their struggles quite easily.
I do not necessarily think that those who wouldn't appreciate them as teenagers would ever appreciate them as adults either — maybe a small percentage would.
I dunno, I feel like Dostoevsky hits perfectly around high school. I enjoyed Crime and Punishment around 9th grade, but tried read some Dostoevsky as an adult, and it really reads like young adult luterature.
I only learned to appreciate Tolstoy as an adult though - it was extremely boring for me as a teenager barring some smaller pieces
Tolstoy is pretty heavy on religious perspectives on moral question. That's probably why I would be boring to a teen. And I totally agree that books like C&P are perfectly readable for young adults. Some people overemphasize the part of analyzing hypothetical symbolism instead of "just" enjoying the story.
Yeah, but I've also appreciated the symbolism much more as an angsty teen than as an adult.
The best part about Tolstoy is how he depicts the intricacies of human relationships, and that's a thing most people cannot appreciate until they hit like 30
The Brothers Karamazov reads like young adult literature? Hard disagree there. Maybe in terms of how navel-gazey it is, but the themes are not at all young adult.
Funny, I'm rereading Crime and Punishment for the first time since high school and I can't get over how much Raskolnikov comes off as an angsty teenager. I probably understand him better now but related to him more as a teen
I would have agreed that making teenagers read way above their (life) experience level may scare some off of returning to the same books after growing up, but am not so sure anymore. Most adults don't read period - if not for the school reading list they wouldn't have even touched the classics anyway.
On the other hand, some of the kids actually like the books they are given. I know I did. Not every single book, but a lot, and maybe that's the whole point- you find out what you like by trying a bunch of stuff that you don't
Most adults don't read because they were forced to read inappropriate, depressing and poorly readable books at the time when they're supposed to be learning to love books.
The classics are the cause of reading hate, not the victim.
IMHO it's less about being a teenager, and more about turning those great classics into school assignments.
With one exception (Musset's Lorenzaccio), every single book my teachers gave me to read felt like a boring chore.
But when I try Crime and Punishment at 17 by myself, I loved it so much that I immediately purchased The Brothers Karamazov (and loved it even more).
I can guarantee that if it had been a school assignment, I wouldn't have made it past page 50.
As a teenager I chose Dostoyevsky for a few big English assignments, much was lost on me. Trying to tackle something you're unprepared for has educational value; like being in a Hacker News startup when you're inexperienced. You might fail at the attempt, but you've learned a lot.
By my third reading, I'd decided Crime and Punishment was a Comedy-Horror; think American Psycho.
The same thing used to happen in Brazil. Machado de Assis is great for older audiences, but a bore for children and teenagers. Making them read his books probably did more harm than good.
Things that need to be taught need to be taught. Reading, writing, and counting can also be kept for later. Misanthropic heralds could even say that many strata of modern society don't really need literacy, and should just be given smartphones with cameras. “Later” easily turns to “never”.
A student should be given the best examples of human art, not some watered down versions, otherwise there is a chance that people will never try to reach that level. A lot of them won't (and reading some books never was a guaranteed path to a good life anyway), but by deciding what is “good enough for the common person” you artificially limit their world on that path (thankfully, there are other paths).
Whether they realise it or not, people are shaped by their environment. A book that you don't like can still point that certain questions and ways of thinking exist. Its place can easily be taken by seemingly “more appropriate” pop cultural or pop psychological works that, unfortunately, don't reach that level in order to be as “accessible” as possible.
The problem here is the existence of “required reading” lists, and mass education in general. That institute is completely flawed, bureaucratised production process of “studying”, and only the heroic actions of individuals who have to fight it from the inside make it less dumb. A good teacher can teach why the good book is good, but where to find so many of them?
See, for example,
https://www.olgasedakova.com/Moralia/280
https://www.olgasedakova.com/ecclesia/2174
(in Russian)
https://www.olgasedakova.com/eng/Moralia/269
https://www.olgasedakova.com/eng/Moralia/264
(in English, excerpt)
Russian literature is based on suffering. Someone always suffers - either the protagonist, the author or the reader. If all of them are suffering you have a masterpiece of Russian literature.
I guess it is because it prepares you quite well to suffer endless corporate memos.
> suffer endless corporate memos
I think classic russian literature can be everything, but not an exercise in formal double-speak incantations.
True. But reading low density, dry material that you don't want to and feeling mental and physical exhaustion from the process sums up both war and peace and corporate communications.
Very droll.
It does unfortunately fit most of the examples I can think of. Even in comedy like Gogol people suffer.
I understand where you coming from, but both Russia classics Soviet and modern authors have decent comedy pieces.
Not to mention works that are just not about suffering but life.
Yes, but the people that have read Moscow 2042 count in the numbers of fingers on the hand of carefree bandsaw user compared to the people that have read Crime and Punishment. Which when I read it I understood that I was punished, but had not idea what my crime was.
The only widely known fun book outside of Russia is Master and Margarita.
>The only widely known fun book outside of Russia is Master and Margarita.
I pretty sure Chekhov (as an example) is widely known outside of Russia and he's master of short fun stories, no?
In fact I'd even say he's somewhat more popular in the West than in Russia.
I would say that Checkhov is mostly known for his plays, not for short fun stories.
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>> my country was effectively enslaved by invading russian forces for decades to serve as nuclear battlefield with the west
Some countries are a buffer zone between Russia and the West. Nothing worse then having western Agent Provocateurs having a base of operation right next to your country.
And somehow Iran, China and Russia have absolutely no experience in using their own Agen Provocateurs. Its always the West creating Coups and Rebellions.
> effectively enslaved by invading russian forces for decades to serve as nuclear battlefield with the west
seems like western germany, which was also considered to be a nuclear battlefield with the warsaw pact, but the marketing was nicer, I suppose.
This isn't a specific Russian problem. English speaking school children are forced to read Shakespeare, and I really don't think that works either. (That isn't a condemnation of Shakespeare but of schooling.)
I do love literature, but that is in spite of school not because of it. School did a lot to put me off some books. I was lucky to have read Golding's "Lord of the Flies" before our class did, because it gave me a better appreciation of it. I did read some big books as a teenager. I waited until my twenties to tackle Dostoyevsky though. "The Brothers Karamazov" was especially difficult.
If your school just had you silently reading Shakespeare they were doing it wrong. It is meant to be performed and watched, his works are plays and poetry not novels. I was lucky, my English Literature teacher in high school was a (very) minor playwright and well aware of how important speaking the lines out loud is, and how watching a play is so very different from reading it.
No, we weren't reading Shakespeare silently. We read him out in class, probably with the least amount of enthusiasm possible.
Shakespeare is good for kids, its mostly quite light and fun and not very long, theres a linguistic challenge but thats a good learning opportunity
It's a 'good learning opportunity' that distracts you from every other aspect of the work.
You can't learn two difficult things at once well. When you have to put significant amounts of mental energy into parsing the semantics of each sentence, it utterly ruins any enjoyment you might have from the work itself - and makes it much harder to clean any meaning or subtext from it.
Shakespeare would land much better if people were reading it in a language they speak, as opposed to a language that he spoke.
When 90% of your mental effort is dedicated to understanding exactly what the hell he is saying, you aren't going to get a lot out of his work.
(It's not supposed to be read at all, in fact - it's supposed to be seen and heard. In a language that you intuitively understand.)
Are kids "ready" to deal with organic chemistry? Or integrals? Do you think that more people will need the knowledge of the reproductive system of plants than the skill of reading and uderstanding large texts? Not simply understanding the words, but actually analyzing and comprehending what's being said
I actually started re-reading Crime and Punishment right after writing my previous comment, because I barely remember anything after many years. These are the second and the third paragraphs, and reading this text now, in my forties, I perfectly understand everything that's written, and the emotions the protagonist feels, because I know by my very own experience what it is to pay rent, to be in debt, and to have no money. But as a teenager? No freaking idea.
He had successfully avoided meeting his landlady on the staircase.
His garret was under the roof of a high, five-storied house and
was more like a cupboard than a room. The landlady who provided
him with garret, dinners, and attendance, lived on the floor below,
and every time he went out he was obliged to pass her kitchen,
the door of which invariably stood open. And each time he passed,
the young man had a sick, frightened feeling, which made him scowl
and feel ashamed. He was hopelessly in debt to his landlady, and
was afraid of meeting her.
This was not because he was cowardly and abject, quite the contrary;
but for some time past he had been in an overstrained irritable
condition, verging on hypochondria. He had become so completely
absorbed in himself, and isolated from his fellows that he dreaded
meeting, not only his landlady, but anyone at all. He was crushed
by poverty, but the anxieties of his position had of late ceased
to weigh upon him. He had given up attending to matters of practical
importance; he had lost all desire to do so. Nothing that any landlady
could do had a real terror for him. But to be stopped on the stairs,
to be forced to listen to her trivial, irrelevant gossip, to pestering
demands for payment, threats and complaints, and to rack his brains
for excuses, to prevaricate, to lie—no, rather than that, he would
creep down the stairs like a cat and slip out unseen.
It's called empathy, we don't have to experience exactly the same thing as other people to be able to understand them. The author himself never experienced the things he's writing about. Do teenagers lack empathy? Of course, but this is education, after all
He probably did not experience that specific situation, but his life before writing “Crime and Punishment” was pretty rough, including prison time and exile in Siberia. Not sure how he would've reacted if he was told that his works will be obligatory reading for 15 years old kids.
I don't think you can educate kids about certain types of emotional matters and certain types of empathy, at any age. Their brains just have not developed to the point where it's possible or useful.
"Empathy" doesn't really fully cover it, though. Yes, someone of any age can emphasize with someone in a tough situation, but actually having experienced something similar, or have seen others in similar situations, or just having lived longer and been exposed to the world at large... all of that changes how a passage like the GP quoted hits. Most children are not going to be able to really feel that passage. But I'd say most worldly adults would be able to, even if they hadn't lived with crushing debt.
I mean, most of us will probably never actually experience having murdered someone.
Yet we still can enjoy the though process of such a person through the book. I don't see why "paying rent" is any more difficult to experience through reading than "murdering" - if anything the general era/geography/social differences are much more significant than these (I live in an ex-Soviet country and read it as a teenager, twice - it had such a profound effect on me. Even still seeing the Russian reality of the time was harder for me (but still easier than I believe it would be for a US teen), than all the intricate internal monologues).
Try to read 10000 random numbers, one by one. Ary you able to understand them? Yes. Do you want to read them? I don't think you do. Now imagine it's pushed to you at age of 16 and called "math". You'll hate it for a good part of your future life.
Teens might know what it's like to owe money to a friend, not be able to pay, and be embarrassed every time they see their friends
If we're going with a math analogy, I guess it's a bit like teaching them integrals in 3rd grade. You can do it, they probably have the raw IQ for it. But they won't really understand and appreciate it at a deep level (this is even a problem for people when they encounter integrals at the end of high school / early uni).
Novels like these need some life experience to really shine. A 13 year old isn't going to go "how does this writer see so clearly through so many of life's finer details", because they have never experienced 90% of what's being talked about.
There's a huge difference between purely intellectual subjects, like organic chemistry and integrals, and the mix of emotional and intellectual depth of a novel. A lot of the meaning of literary works is built on top of shared human experiences, just like the meaning of integrals is built on top of more foundational math. However, we don't have any good way (and certainly make no effort in school) to teach this shared human experience to pre-teens and teens.
A good part of the value of some of these works basically comes from recalling similar feelings you felt in situations similar to the characters, maybe comparing your actions at such times to theirs, or the reactions of other people you knew, etc. It's simply not possible to experience this part of the work as a teen. Perhaps one of the clearest examples of this limitation is in Lolita - the nature of the relationship described, the power and life experience differential, the contrast with the reader's normal interactions with children - are impossible to be conveyed to or truly empathized with by teens.
STEM subjects are actually taught in order with foundations first, etc etc. Literature requires understanding all kinds of context that they don't teach.
> Are kids "ready" to deal with organic chemistry? Or integrals?
Yes, absolutely. A kid can learn both of those things and understand them, assuming they have the proper foundational knowledge, taught to them in prior classes/years.
Most kids do not have the lived experience or emotional development to understand the complex adult themes written about in novels such as the ones being discussed. There's really no way to fix that aside from waiting until they're older.
Yes the amount of damage this does to kids must be huge.
Some people here argue that "math is also what kids don't like" but math and chemistry can be understood by a teenager even if he doesn't like it. But these "classic" books can't because much more life, adult problems and having children, deaths of parents and illnesses have to happen in order for one to comprehend this books.
It's like trying to force a 8 year old to read romance novels: since his sexual hormones are not yet activated, he won't understand why a boy all of a sudden likes a girl.
The main damage is they forced it into us and call it "classic literature".
I hated it with passion, even got F's in my report cards, and could re-read it only in my late 20's. Still hate these "language and literature" teachers, all of them.
Same thing with religion and other forms of high culture. Introducing it too early will only result in a distaste, and that the person thinks they already know it. Reading the Bible as an adult can be thrilling.
I liked it especially as a teenager - that is the time when you are the most depressed and the books makes most sense. Not everyone will like every book. That personal preference does not mean the book cant speak to the whole age category.
Vennira Iravugal (White Nights) translated in Tamil by R. Krishnaiyya was my first read from Dostoyevsky's works. I came to a realisation that the dynamics of formative romance, anguish of unrequitedness, dithering nature of one's mind towards commitment have long been fundamental characteristics of a human being from the time immemorial (at least from when this book was published in 1848) after the read. Dostoyevsky has this acumen of rightly pointing out primal nature of a human in various settings through his stories. Crime and Punishment, which I read in English, entrenched this view in my mind undisputedly.
Tamil translators have done astonishing efforts in presenting the worlds and sentiments of Dostoyevsky, yet I cannot compare it with OG Russian versions as I do not know Russian. I might one day be in a position to read his classics in native versions (I want to learn Russian for this).
Russian stuff were translated into Bengali a lot in 1970s - especially works favoured in the USSR. I came across multiple translations of children's books, and loved reading them as a kid. My father and aunt read those in their childhood. Raduga and Mir published Bengali books and printed them in Moscow, and shipped them to Calcutta. They were cheap, too.
I didn't like the flow of translation of Bengali versions of "adult" books, and read them in English.
My favourite Russian writer has to be Bulgakov who fell from grace of the Party, and his work was not translated. I am yet to read Solzhenitsyn.
Nowadays, there are indie blogs that scan and preserve those Bengali books. A lot of people I know download and print those books. You can still find Moscow-printed Bengali books in used-book stores of book fairs.
I (precocious, pretentious me) read Anna Karenina in 7th grade. It was long but not difficult. Keeping track of the characters was the hardest part.
I’d like to say the story stayed with me, but alas it was the reaction of adults to my reading matter that I remember.
Part of growing up was realizing that being precocious really isn’t a thing anymore at some point.
This resonates with me very much. I remember being very proud of myself each time I was tested in school and I was told I was reading at such-and-such a grade level above my own. Now in my 30s, I still like reading a lot, but there's so much more to reading than finishing books.
I still have a bit of reticence toward admitting that I find some books hard or haven't finished them. I found the Iliad enthralling and the Odyssey very good, but basically any other English epic poetry or drama is such a grind and I've given up many times.
I think a lot of the deeper enjoyment of literature comes when one has a sufficient understanding of the relevant culture & context and can adequately bring the characters to life. I studied Latin for 5 years (and Spanish for 3, Portuguese for 2 and German for 1), and I can tell you the immersion into Roman (and Roman Empire) culture absolutely made reading everything from Homer to Herodotus to Augustine to Seutonius to Cicero, Catullus or Ovid far more engaging than if I'd picked up any of these authors without context.
I recently started reading Anna Karenina, and even for me as an adult, there's a lot of people with a lot of interconnected relationships to keep track of. But I am surprised by how moving I find it - I guess I expected it to be more distant somehow, but the people really spring to life. If I'd read it as a kid, I imagine I would be relating differently to all of these very adult concerns.
One of the best gifts I ever got was when my dad plopped down a big box full of old classical adventure novels (Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas, King Solomon's Mines, Captains Courageous, Three Musketeers, Count of Monte Cristo type of stuff) and I devoured all of them over the course of the next year or so. I'm sure I would appreciate a lot of different things about them if I read them now, but they certainly held up in terms of being engaging in spite of them all being 100+ years old by the time I got my hands on them.
I was a precocious reading kid too, and I sometimes wonder how much I understood of all the stuff I read. I feel like I remember it decently enough, but there must have been a lot going over my head.
This made me smile because I did exactly the same thing (i.e. I also read Anna Karenina in 7th grade, and was very pretentious). I mostly read during lunch periods when it probably would have been a better idea to be developing my social skills.
I remember being most interested in Konstantin Levin's efforts to modernize his farm estate.
I think that at the time I thought that I understood the difficult books that I was reading fully, but looking back on it I must have missed so much. I'll need to have a re-read one of these days.
I am genuinely curious why Russian literature is so popular in non-Russian speaking world. How do you wake up one day and decide to read Crime and Punishment? How do you find out about Russian literature in the first place? Recommendation from a friend, marketing in your favorite book store, school? Could somebody shed some light
Actually USSR pushed a lot of soft power and spent real money behind it. Especially the authors whose narratives didn't directly violate the narrative of the Party.
Leftist parts of society looked up to USSR a lot, and a lot of humanities professors, teachers all over the world were left-leaning, and promoted these books as Russian culture.
This is one factor, and doesn't explain the whole thing, of course.
See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48673777. Neither our family nor I ever leaned towards the Party or any form of Leftism, but books are always kosher in our culture.
Dostoyevsky was massively popular way before the USSR. Nietzsche and Freud were huge admirers. His book sold well in Europe in his lifetime. Same with Tolstoy. Sincerely doubt the USSR soft power moved the needle in any meaningful sense.
> Actually USSR pushed a lot of soft power and spent real money behind it. Especially the authors whose narratives didn't directly violate the narrative of the Party.
Do you have any sources for that? I'd like to read about it.
Well it is kind of an integral part of the classic european literature canon. Certain novel genre's were invented by Russian writers, say, Tolstoy's epic novels.
So the question really is how does one find out about classic writing overall? Outside of school?
BTW, calling that an epic novel is a stretch. Actually great Russian writers like Gogol (surprisingly, Dead Souls is a poem, in prose) and Pushkin (Captain's Daughter is neither novella or novel) had difficulties fitting into Western genres of fiction. I'm sure there are more examples.
Well, Crime and Punishment is often taught in US high schools. Or at least was back in the 1980s. During the Cold War there was a lot of interest in Russian literature in general in part because in the bipolar world they were seen as "the other civilization" that we needed to understand if we wanted to avoid nuclear war. You'd think these days people would be more into Chinese literature but except for the Three Body Problem series, I haven't really heard of many Chinese books becoming popular here.
Russian lit was never part of my highschool reading. Freshman year was Greek classics and Shakespeare, sophmore year was more Shakespeare and Romance. Junior year was classic American lit, and senior year was Norse mythology and british lit. I diverged from my friends and decided to take the non-AP English classes junior and senior year. I would have been reading non-fiction in AP English Language and books by Bronte and Dickens for AP English Literature. I'm don't think the IB courses covered Russian lit either although my school didn't offer IB.
My liberal arts classes in college didn't involve Russian lit either. My freshman year English I and II classes were very unserious, we read Philip K Dick and a (somewhat distasteful) book by the current governor of Maryland. I could have taken a Russian lit class but instead decided on Appalachian studies which was surprisingly interesting and probably helped shaped some of my politics. I did read A Day in the Life while I was taking summer classes. Admittedly, I was on Adderall at the time which led to me reading at a rate that matched when I was a kid and was tearing through books faster than I could get to the library. I listen to a lot of audiobooks now and miss when I had the attention span to actually crack a book (or at least use a kindle). I've got a copy of Crime and Punishment in my queue but I've been reluctant to start it.
The same was as literature from anywhere else. Some authors are famous and you grow up knowing about them: I know about great Russian authors the same way I know about great authors from anywhere. They also get referenced and quoted by authors in other languages. Playwrights get translated and performed.
Less famous authors? Everything you say and more - again, just like any other books and author.
I was a precocious teen - reading philosophy and history in addition to fantasy and science fiction - and came across Crime & Punishment in a local bookstore that I purchased paperbacks and Dungeons & Dragons books. The back sounded interesting and the book looked deep and philosophical so I purchased it. Despite it not being a great translation I found the book and topics covered really interesting and went on to read most of Dostoyevsky works.
those books are considered as classics because they deal with different aspects of the human condition which haven't changed significantly. they also give a different and valid intepretation / perspective on these "eternal topics", which are unique and discernible enough from their counterparts from other countries and cultures.
> because they deal with different aspects of the human condition which haven't changed significantly. they also give a different and valid intepretation / perspective
so do the other literary traditions I guess. What's so special about Russian. It seems as if the interest in Russian literature comes at the expense of the others.
absolutelly – I didn't mean to say that other literary traditions don't have their valid perspective on the same issues. my best guess is that russian culture is on the surface understandable / relatable from a western readers point of view but differs in nuances, which makes it "exotic" but not unrelatable. I don't think that this comes at the expense of the others – you're free to read chinese classics after all, but I assume that the threshold of "getting it" will be much higher since most people in the west are not accustomed to the radical different culture which it is based upon.
I also stumbled onto Crime and Punishment at 18 and expected it to be difficult and was blown away with how Dostoyevsky wrote one of the greatest novels of all time, to be sure, but as the author here says, also how engaging he made it.
The scene where he commits the crime is an absolute stunner, edge-of-your-seat, thriller. Who does that? Who can pull that off? Dostoyevsky
Dostoyevsky was originally published in magazines chapter by chapter, so he would end the December’s on a cliffhanger so that the readers re-subscribed
You've touched on my favorite Dostoevsky anecdote! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21152240.
A lot of 19th century novels were published as serials. The TV of their time I suppose.
With the final installment arriving by ship, crowds in New York shouted from the pier "Is Little Nell dead?" - https://www.charlesdickenspage.com/charles-dickens-old-curio...
Dunno. I can't read Russian for shit (pre-kindergarten level, I'd guess), but it seems like cheating to read it in English.
I can't imagine how much amazing and important literature you'd miss if you were snobby enough to think that you could only read things in their original language.
I'm so glad I get to read the Russians and Kafka and Calvino and Murakami and Camus and Marquez and Homer and Plato and, heck, the Bible.
I do know the feeling. I struggled through the start of My Brilliant Friend because I ought to read it in Italian, because I speak it pretty well. So then I didn't read it for years. Finally I just read it in English and enjoyed myself.
Aww, I loved My Brilliant Friend (but I've never studied Italian at all, it was translation or nothing for me).
There’s a Milan Kundera essay (having trouble locating atm) about how most of the great writers, including the Russian greats, read the literary canon exclusively through translations (Shakespeare for example) and were no less intellectually rewarded for it.
Translation is an art I think equal to authorship. Someone below mentioned My brilliant friend which was originally written in a Neapolitan dialect but the English translation, at least for me specifically, is a monumental achievement.
Here's the essay: Die Weltliteratur (2007) http://archive.today/1M3Q3
Thanks for sharing! I probably last read it in 2010 so I’ll have to see if my interpretation of it holds up.
A translation is by necessity a work of both the author and the translator. There have been some amazing pairings such as Kafka translated by Edwin and Willa Muir. I don't think a translation necessarily diminishes the original work or the reader.
I have Crime and Punishment in both languages, in the same book, page for page. So you can always fall back to English if you get lost. It also has (or I remember it having, I don't have it at hand) extensive translation notes, useful for non-obvious idioms and cultural/contemporary references.
If you can read more than one language, try reading translations into two or three different ones. It'll give you a different view of a book you enjoy: the translations will all have a different feel, in my experience.
some portion of this is based on your own relationship with the language, the people and contexts you use it in and learned it in, and your familiarity with this langugage. This is not only okay, its actually cool as all heck. It's being read the same novel by a stern father, a passionate lover, and a friend in the pub doing stupid voices to make you laugh.
I know the feeling. Reading Don Quixote in English would be cheating.
Then again, so would reading Shakespeare in Spanish - even though I'm more comfortable reading in eng, I'm better in Spanish than i am 500 year old English
When raising children, introduce Dostoyevsky to Sophomores not Seniors. The Landlady and some short stories, like White Nights. Leave Notes from Underground lying around at-hand. Watch Love and Death on family movie night. Chekov is nice at about this time, too, but again, short stories are best. Developing the skills to read Russian literature take a little time, and when you pick up Crime and Punishment, Anna Karenina, War and Peace, The Brothers Karamazov, or Dead Souls, it's nice to feel at home in the genre so the glories of the work can shine without caveat.
Dostoevsky is surprisingly great to read. I first started with "Notes from Underground (1864)" and I found it a profound book. Then I read Brothers Karamazov, and it is one of those "great" books. I wrote my reflections here: https://ritogh.substack.com/p/reflections-on-brothers-karama....
I thoroughly enjoyed Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, and White Nights, but I'm finding myself slogging through Karamazov. I'm about 600 pages in and its picking up at least. Banking on it all being worth it in the end. Normally I subscribe to the quote "life's too short to read a bad book", but making an exception for Dostoyevsky.
I started with Karamazov, then C&P, then the Idiot.
I loved excerpts of Karamazov (The Grand Inquisitor, Dimitry's troika ride, any passage with Grushenka) but I also found it rough to get through. I really don't think I was ultimately able to appreciate it as a whole.
C&P felt much smoother and finally I devoured The Idiot. Those novels felt like night and day compared to Karamazov.
With Karamazov, I feel like there is some subtext or context I'm missing and would have loved to have had a companion text or course to help me.
When I first Master and Margarita, it came with incredible footnotes, and rereading it again I found I sometimes recalled the footnotes more than the text. I recommended the book to a friend, but their edition didn't have the footnotes so they bounced right off it.
Anyway if anyone knows of an edition better than the Penguin Classic of BK I'm all ears.
Check out the Pevear and Volokhonsky translation of BK. P&L try to really bridge the contextual gap with a lot of footnotes/endnotes.
Ha. I love Karamazov. To me, it boils down to a love affair/triangle and case of mistaken identity and ultimate justice. But in true Russian lit fashion, you must pass through the absurd with a detour through morality and human nature.
edit: I read the Barnes and Noble translation. And I would encourage reading some passages aloud.
I had the same experience, lol. I started with Crime and Punishment expecting thinly veiled philosophy where each character is a mouthpiece for one of the author's thought processes. Granted there's some of that, but I wasn't expecting such an exciting murder drama. Went into Karamazov expecting an exciting murder drama, and got the type of Russian literature I initially expected Crime and Punishment to be! Really it's a question of expectations.
I've taken several stabs at it over the years but I always give up in exhaustion. It feels badly in need of an editor, not that anyone would dare. Maybe this is a consequence of the format: it was released serially in chapters to a literary periodical over the span of a couple years. It certainly would've been nice to trim away some of the side characters and ecclesiastical debates for a more focused read, but we got what we got.
Karamazov is amazing.
But if you're 600 pages in and it's a slog you might have lost the train of thought of the novel.
It is a lot to keep in your head!
Yeah I've picked it up and put it down multiple times over the past year, might have had some context loss. Theres been a few very lucid monologues I've enjoyed, but I haven't felt the same level of internal revelation as the previous novels.
Try the Ignat Avsey translation, it’s great
To give you one idea of the approach - the accurately translated title is The Karamazov Brothers. Every other translator chooses the usual way because it sounds grander or eccentric or just because that’s how others did it before them, even though it’s simply incorrect as a translation.
P&V - one of them edits without even knowing Russian, a polar opposite
Karamazov is basically YA fiction though. Find other works if you’re not into it as an older adult, it’s fine
Nabokov didnt like Dostoyevsky either, especially Karamazov https://www.nytimes.com/1981/08/23/magazine/nabokov-on-dosto...
His criticism of characters being laid bare at the beginning of the novel is fair, especially in Karamazov. Unlike Nabokov I don't think it detracts from the work.
He was a noted hater of many great authors and works so naming one target of his doesn’t carry much weight
Funny, I'm just reading War and Peace myself (the Anthony Briggs translation) and having the same reaction, gushing occasionally to people I know how approachable it is, and how darkly funny and modern it feels. Well, at least after passing through the first ~200 pages which are a slog. I didn't find even Tolstoy's historical musings boring, although he tends to repeat himself. And I usually suck at names, but the main characters are done so well I find them easy to remember. There aren't that many important ones despite how it seems at the start. It also serves as a fascinating peek into the daily lives of Russians of all stripes in the early 1800s.
I also had the same reaction to Crime and Punishment as the OP did.
Read those first 200 pages 10x could never get past it. 300 characters with names that I’ll never remember, some woman and her son, a general or something. A guy that keeps saying “Capital!”, standing around at parties.
I’m sure it’s good but I don’t think I have it in me to try again.
I swear it took me six retries to make it past the start. But if you have six hours the BBC adaptation is pretty good IMHO and captures many of the essentials of the book if not all the details. The show made me cry and the book did not have the same effect but maybe that was because it focused on certain aspects. I particularly remember the combat scenes in the book would have been difficult to match - the prose capturing the chaos and randomness of brutality in the neighborhood of D Day landing in Saving Private Ryan but with horse cavalry charges and cannon fire.
I listened to the audio book version of War and Peace. I think it was something like 25-30 hours. The audio format helped keep the pace going and also it helped with the names. Although for some things, the audio format made it harder to look up in the dictionary, like I kept hearing agitant instead of adjutant, so that part didn't make sense in a lot of the military scenes. I agree with the parent that the book was very engaging, parts even felt like I was watching a movie, e.g. the drunken party tying a bear to a police officer, the foxhunt scene, the duel, the battles like when Petya gets shot, and the burning of Moscow. I even liked the abstract ending when Tolstoy relates human history to calculus so that each individual person has an infinitesimal but real contribution to history.
People here have trouble with names, but for a Slavic language speaker like myself, the names are one of the best parts. Even if I don't speak Russian, names like "Razkolnikov" ooze his indecisiveness. And the characters the author doesn't like, he shows contempt for them by not even giving them a proper name, calling them Mr. C. or something like that.
My problem with Dostoyevsky is that I simply don't like his style.. despite being a voracious reader it was pure torture getting through The Idiot and I gave up 1/3 of the way during Crime and Punishment. Had to re-read parts out loud again to help my son who had to read it for high school and begged me to help him somehow (we share the dislike it seems). He's one of the authors I would really love to like, but it's just not happening
> I discovered that I don’t actually read names, I just pattern match, and I have sometimes gotten hundreds of pages into a novel before I realize that I have no clear sense of the the middle syllables of the protagonist’s name.
Same. TIL this is not just me being lazy.
I did the same for a long time, but the diminuitives and nicknames for characters made that too hard to do, so I just ate the acorn and learned a bit about patronyms, pronunciation, etc...
One thing is a lot of common television/movie tropes are instantly recognizable in one form or another in there, the murder in Crime and Punishment is a series of coincidences and lucky timing for him to initially get away with it that would not be out of place in modern thriller or comedy. I had the same issue with the names so I took notes and bookmarked the Wikipedia page for the books to refresh my memory of whom was whom until it stuck. Audiobooks (most of the russian classics are free from my local library)help a lot with the pronunciation if one is like the writer and pattern matches names - hearing them a few times initially is very helpful. Side note - not a sea person but only from audiobooks learned i didn’t know how to pronounce English words boatswain, gunwale and forecastle.
What disginguishes Dostoevsky is his attention to detail and this unusual ability to describe someone inside and out with a voice that finds some sort of intrinsic fascination with the person no matter how dark, dingy, flawed, or just plain strange they are. It's like he withholds judgement without being clinical. His writing is peppered with these sketches, filled with insight, and it's not just a still-life - he manages to weave in these character studies with action and interaction. Most of us look out and see a lawn, boring and inert. He looks out and sees a lawn comprised of individual blades of grass, growing in soil of a specific kind, some weeds, cut some time ago, insects striving and fighting and dying and reproducing, the effects of weather and sun and shade making microclimates from which whole communities of life escape from or to....if there is anything to learn from him it is his gorgeous attention to details that we know are there but have long since ceased bothering to note.
Awareness. He learned it when he was (as he thought) about to be executed.
As he wrote to his brother the same day:
"When I look back into the past and think how much time has been wasted, how much of it wasted in delusions, mistakes, idleness, in the inability to live; how little I cherished it, how many times I sinned against my heart and my soul — my heart bleeds. Life is a gift, life is happiness, every minute could have been a century of happiness. Si jeunesse savait!"
Crime and Punishment is a bona fide detective story / crime novel, and can be enjoyed as such.
One of my professors, so long ago that I can't remember which*, said it was not a who-dun-it but a why-dun-it.
The murder scene is so vivid that it's easy to forget how the long middle of the novel is the cat-and-mouse game between him and the detective whose name I forget.
* I think I remembered. Thank you Roman! https://www.dignitymemorial.com/en-ca/obituaries/calgary-ab/...
I'm reading Crime and Punishment now. I've previously read Karamazov. I agree that it's not particularly hard reading other than the names. And also, maybe, the characters tend to go on long tirades. And I guess you need to know a little bit of Russian history, too. But they're not that difficult. Otherwise his books wouldn't have been that popular. They sold phenomenally well in his lifetime and continue to do so.
I see a lot of praise for Dostoevsky in here, personally, my attempt to read Crime and Punishment resulted in me giving up after a couple hundred pages, it read kind of like a crime novel if it was mostly slice of life and random characters rambling about the goings on of their personal lives, which I did not have interest in and so I dropped it. Maybe I am too stupid for it, but I can't say it is my cup of tea.
That is fine. You may not do well in the UK's The Office trivia quiz* (next question is about Suez Canal!) but apart from that who cares.
* The joke being they do a huge running one upmanship sketch on how much they know about Dostoyevsky before the quiz.
From the circles I am exposed to Pevear and Volokhonsky's translations are not seen as the most natural ones (although they are the only ones I have read because of the cool abstract paperback covers). I have heard they miss anecdotes and humor in favor of word accuracy. Characters are always "twisting their mouth" and similar. I'm looking forward to re-reading Demons in some other translation. He might have been well served by Garnett.
I'd much prefer people just stay away from reading it altogether if they find it difficult... If it's difficult, then it probably isn't for you. At least I wouldn't bother wasting my time, unless I treat it as some kind of exercise.
I read his writings because they read like my own thoughts from the very start and I never had any trouble finishing. He is the only writer who's works I've read countless times (never thought about counting, but Idiot, Karamazov at least 20 times). That would make him what would normally be called my "favorite writer", although I do not say that either. On the other hand, I have difficultly reading most other writers.
Sometime in the 90s we started getting really good Dostoyevsky translations, and they make a huge difference.
Crime and Punishment is basically the modern Ur-novel for “your rational plans for success seem logical to you, but will not work out in the way you imagine.”
Pretty relevant for the contemporary tech world, if you ask me.
For people who read literature, yes.
But the average person in the US atm can't even read a children's book, and this includes recent college students:
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2024/11/the-eli...
https://futurism.com/future-society/college-students-losing-...
We're becoming an oral and pictorial society.
I became motivated to read Russian literature after Norm Macdonald died, knowing how much influence it had on him and chasing more of his voice. Reading Brothers Karamazov in Norm's voice made it so much more entertaining. Ironically, Norm viewed Dostoyevsky as one of the inferior Russian writers.
Here's some of Norm's thoughts about Russian literature and how to read it:
Norm Macdonald @normmacdonald · Feb 9, 2016
Tolstoy is the best writer who has ever lived. Some people are intimidated
by that fact.
Norm Macdonald @normmacdonald · Feb 9, 2016
Read, in chronological order if possible, everything Tolstoy has ever
written.
Norm Macdonald @normmacdonald · Feb 9, 2016
People think Tolstoy would be too difficult to understand since he is the
greatest writer to ever have drawn breath.
Norm Macdonald @normmacdonald · Feb 9, 2016
Since I am asked about Tolstoy I will suggest all read him. Read all he has
written. Here's the thing about Tolstoy.
Norm Macdonald @normmacdonald · Feb 9, 2016
Tolstoy could write a massive book like War & Peace and have every word be
necessary.
Norm Macdonald @normmacdonald · Feb 9, 2016
Dosto is a fine writer. Better are Tolstoy, Chekhov, Gogol, Turgenev and
Pushkin.
Norm Macdonald @normmacdonald · Feb 9, 2016
To be a great writer you must be able to communicate with the reader.
Tolstoy communicates better than anyone else ever.
Norm Macdonald @normmacdonald · Feb 9, 2016
Dostoevsky was far the inferior to Tolstoy, he was inferior to most of the
great Russians.
Norm Macdonald @normmacdonald · Feb 9, 2016
Agree completely. Should read both actually. and P&V have not translated
most Tolstoy, so then go to Constance.
Norm Macdonald @normmacdonald · Feb 7, 2018
Well, Jocelyn, I don't know of what other authors you refer to, but Tolstoy
isn't a nihilist. X.com/FLEURdian_slip...
T.L. States @epmornsesh · Dec 21, 2018
@normmacdonald Any authors you would recommend that are writing killer
comedic fiction?
Norm Macdonald @normmacdonald · Dec 21, 2018
Tolstoy, Chekhov, Philip Roth, Salinger, me.
Norm Macdonald @normmacdonald · Jan 21, 2019
@GaryGulman Read great works of Literature out loud. If you do not
understand what you are reading, stop, figure out what it means, then
repeat the exercise. Do this an hour a day and in time, your own voice,
your own thoughts will become the same as Tolstoy, Faulkner, Twain.Oh, yes, he was doing a "book club" on twitter for a little while. I remember him doing an interesting thread on an Updike book where he was making a point that the author was a great writer because he could make a character that was simply a good writer, with the larger point that people can't write convincing characters that are smarter than they are.
I have never read a book I hated more than The Brothers Karamazov. I never read a book that depressed me more than Crime and Punishment. No more Dostoevsky for me.
You're doing it wrong. I bumped into this 'Short Guide to Russian literature':
"Russian literature consists of suffering. Either writer suffers, or protagonist, or reader. If all three suffer simultaneously--then it is a masterpiece. In every difficult situation always read Russian classic literature--it is even worse in there."
Maybe I like my characters to be in worse situations but inspire me by overcoming them and giving hope. Dostoyevsky leaves you in a pool of gray melancholy and dispair.
I liked The Possessed by Elif Batuman. I had read The Idiot in high school, a death march for a term paper. But I liked Batuman's reading of it better than mine (but not enough to re-read it).
> The Possessed (2010), The Idiot (2017), and Either/Or (2022)
That's like publishing Hamlet (2010), King Lear (2017), and Thus Spake Zarathustra (2022). I wonder what her thought process is in choosing these titles? And what will her next work be?
She has an academic background in Russian Literature and writes really engaging essays about her encounters with the literature (The Possessed). I can’t recommend her novels and essays enough. They’re riotously funny and erudite and readable if you’re looking for something.
Her coming-of-age short story or perhaps memoir of a few years ago in The New Yorker has stayed with me. Only after finishing and contemplating it does the tragedy of the young woman's experience really make itself felt.
Lol, remember being in my early 20s on a train and trying to read Crime and Punishhment, and just kept skipping random 5 pages here and there, before going back to playing Durak with some random Tajiks (who got kicked off the train in some random place...). The huge pages of French didn't help.
Prefered Demons, personally. Probably becuase I read it when more mature.
Wonderful to see Durak mentioned. I learned it in its Vietnamese form (Tấn) and introduced it to friends in Australia where it was a big hit. We eventually settled on calling it "Dickhead" or "Dumbarse" which seems like an appropriately Australian interpretation of the source material :thinking:
Oh, this weird little game!
In my little hometown back in Lithuania we played the game as teens so much that everybody knew the optimal strategy, and it was more about either sheer luck, or who misremembers other people hands.
A bit like checkers after a certain level.
For a change of pace in Russian authors, I would recommend the newer "Jamila" by Chingiz Aitmatov, 1958.
Delved into Russian literature during the "pandemic years". Reading "Crime and Punishment" was definitely the latter but used a study guide to assist (read guide after reading the book chapter). Then the "Brothers..." followed by other authors Turgenev "Fathers and Sons" and Tolstoy's "The Resurrection". Many lessons to learn by these brilliant writers.
Dostoevsky published many of his novels in installments in journals. Being easy to read and hooking the reader in was a basic requirement for his writing to be successful.
Will Poulter (yes, him) has a very good Crime & Punishment audiobook.
Doesn't surprise me at all. He's really a character actor who happens to look like he does. Similar to Dan Stevens, who coincidentally, has some great Agatha Christie audiobooks. He does all the voices.
That's funny, I recognized the name, but had to look him up and went "oh yeah, eyebrows guy!".
The kid who played Joffrey on game of thrones also always came across as a very smart, thoughtful kid, he just played an intensely hateable character. Similar to the actor who played Marlo in The Wire, I saw him host an actors roundtable and had to blink twice "wow, one of the scariest villains in a gritty show is actually this cheerful, charismatic guy.
I don't think all actors are smart, and I certainly think some actors think they are smarter than they are, but I don't think being smart hurts if you're an actor.
The Pevear and Volohonsky "translations" are an affront to english prose, russian literature, and the craft of translation in general. A heavily quantized LLM with an aneurism would provide the reader with a better translation than that trash.
(I used to be a professional translator for the relevant languages, so I have opinions™)
Which translations would you recommend for Crime and Punishment or Dostoyevsky in general?
When I'm starting to read a non-English novel, the process of deciding which translation to use is half the fun. The Kent and Berbera (revised Garnett) version of Anna Karenina was mesmerizing.
As a matter of tangent-(ial relation), have you ever come across or read any of Silverman's translations of mathematics or science from Russian? Supposedly they were slanted by opinion, a mis-informed Westerner's perspectives, and had a number of liberties such as re-arrangement (in a mathematics text!). I wanted to read the (more recent) original and asked a classmate to buy it on an exchange but have not met up afterward.
As someone who only gets time to read when tired at the end of the day: I can't get past the first 50 pages of any Dostoyevsky work.
Why are the classics classic? I doubt being a great read is sufficient or necessary; I struggle to read most classics, Dickens being the only exception.
I'm not reading to study, I want to be entertained! I want engagement, I want clarity, I want suspense! I don't want to wrestle with the author's intentions, I want to be gripped by the character and their situation.
If you still want to give the Russian literature a try, maybe Bulgakov? A little bit more modern (early 20th century); "A Young Doctor's Notebook" is probably what you are looking for in terms of engagement, clarity, suspense, and size as well (those are short stories). English translations I looked at are good enough to my taste.
Ok, I've added "A Young Doctor's Notebook" to my list. Thanks!
Funnily enough, I'm currently reading a book by a Russian author. 'Metro 2033' by Dmitry Glukhovsky. It's post-apocalyptic and set in the Moscow subway.
I agree with all your points on why you should read... in fact I loved Crime & Punishment exactly for those reasons
I think its ok not to like Dostoyevsky, de gustibus - but you are implying that people read him to feel smart or that they need to put a great amount of effort in reading... great books have an healing effect even when tired and at the end of the day...
> but you are implying that people read him to feel smart or that they need to put a great amount of effort in reading
Yes, I did imply that. Maybe my experiences have been more challenging than I expected.
Ok, I will try Crime & Punishment again. I really do want to have that feeling of reading something great.
Not difficult, just boring.
This rings a bell, because I decided to tackle Don Quixote (English translation). At 200 pages in (of around 1000, I think), it’s funny and entertaining and feels fresh.
Many of the subplots have been reused for entire romance movies, and lots of the mini adventures would not be out of place in something like Its Always Sunny in Philadelphia, as odd as that sounds.
As I get older I appreciate more how much nineteenth and twentieth century literature has in common with the modern era. Notes From the Underground was a great example of this where the narrator feels that he's destined for great things but self-sabotages along the way, becoming more and more isolated. He isn't that much different from the many educated, underemployed and frustrated, or even insufferable, people on the Internet. We haven't changed that much at all.
Unpopular opionion - Dostoyevsky is just russian Kipling. Empire apologist who pretended to write about deep stuff but in the end always got the convenient result.
This is not an attempt at affected nonchalance, but I’ve simply never come across the idea that Dostoevsky is particularly difficult to read.
A somewhat gifted teenager will race through it, as will an average adult.
The death of Ivan Ilyich by Tolstoy is bleak, humane and fairly short. I enjoyed it like a good Charles Dickens
IMO The Russians were always more of a joy to read than English and Americans
He isn't difficult but I always thought Nabokov (in his fairly incendiary reviews http://wmjas.wikidot.com/nabokov-s-recommendations) was on point that he was sentimental, preachy and mediocre as an artist.
I found Dostoyevsky a slog to get through and it might have been made worse because he was sold to me as this 'great psychologist' when psychological realism is often missing from his stories and characters become page-long megaphones for some version of Orthodox Russian nationalism or Christianity.
I think Nabokov definitely has a point with brothers. Ivan's portrayal and brain fever always struck me as a cop out because Dostoyevsky couldnt actually articulate what was wrong with his ideology. Of course thats kind of the point, but still it always felt cheap and clumsy to me
im only getting 504's on the website
As I've said at least once before: come back, pvg!
If ever we needed you...
Shoutout to The Gambler
Having trouble following names? Read I Claudius.
If you liked "The Idiot", there's a wonderfully bizzare adaptation: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0255958/
Looks like there are English subtitles that are quite decent.
I watched it before I read the book and I wasn't aware it's an adaptation (not obvious at all). Imagine how perplexed and confused I was when I finally got around the book :D
The film is hilarious but probably hard to enjoy for someone who's not deep into the cultural context, it's not just the language.
"I never got into the Russians, they take too long getting to the feckin' point!"
"Oh? Not even Dostoyevsky?"
"Oh come on now, he was the main offender."
- The Guard
yeah it is. don't be pretentious. that said, audio books are the way to go if you are having trouble
LMAO he's saying russian lit is readable when using the most bastardized, westernized translations available, Garnet. That was the point of her work and what P&V sought to rectify when they put out their vastly more faithful renditions.
I recently worked my way through (in order) Anna Karenina, Crime & Punishment, The Idiot, and The Brothers Karamazov. Each time seeking Garnett translations as I found the usual recommendations just not hitting the spot. That said, and for context I'm English, and new to the classics- so not sure if the writing style just clicked more. I did switch half way to McDuff for The Idiot and wasn't too far from Garnett.
Don't really know what point you're trying to make here. Maybe Garnett is more westernized, but that doesn't make it more readable. IMO Garnett's not great (at least for Anna Karenina, which is all I've read by her); from what I've read P&V is more readable than Garnett.
I avoid Pevear and Volokhonsky translations. I've tried reading a few of them but I really can't stand their English style. I've been caught out more than once when reading a Russian book and wondering why I didn't like it, and finding their names on the cover.
They are prolific and have cornered the market, which is part of the problem.
War and Peace is one of those books I've reread every decade since I was a teenager. It's one of my favorite novels because, as I've matured and moved through different stages of life, the parts that resonate with me change significantly. Each rereading feels like encountering a different book, not because the words have changed, but because my own life experiences have shaped what draws my attention.
I'm sure many books offer this experience, but War and Peace explores the human condition across a lifetime in a way few novels do.
I fell into War and Peace and couldn't stop. The opposite was true with crime and punishment for me.. I just couldn't get into it. There are such fundamentally different works
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I regret every minute I've spent reading Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. The most overhyped literature ever, with an unhealthy obsession by contemporary readers living far away from the epicenter of it all.
> The most overhyped literature ever
Just because you aren't ready for it doesn't mean it's bad literature. That's basic.
I really like Dostoevsky. He was really onto something. What he wrote was deep and meaningful and profound.
Tolstoy is also great. His short story "The Three Hermits" (1885) profoundly impacted how I look into these things.
They are not bad. But neither they are great, just average. They are also super outdated and missing a lot of context from the time authors lived in. These books just have this fleurs exotique by the virtue of being russian and written in a very hard language for the Roman group speakers. It's a self-perpetuating self-reinforcing cycle of hype. Like a joke a about "no one was fired for ordering IBM" the same goes for the "classic" literature. No one was criticized for including Tolstoy and Dostoevsky in a 100 Best Books Of All Times list, and so they are invariably included again and again.
What's a book you would recommend instead? I quite like what I've read from those authors but I would be interested in something with a different appeal.