Join the discussion
Write your take first — we'll ask for email only when you're ready to publish.
- Hacker News
- > 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.
by d1ss0nanz - 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...by jszymborski
- 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.by stevenwoo
- Crime and Punishment is a bona fide detective story / crime novel, and can be enjoyed as such.by nine_k
- 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.by simpaticoder
- 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™)
by slackfan - 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.
- 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.
by jallmann - 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.
by olvy0 - 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.
by user3939382 - 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.
- Nabokov didnt like Dostoyevsky either, especially Karamazov https://www.nytimes.com/1981/08/23/magazine/nabokov-on-dosto...by HDThoreaun
- 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!
by crypttales - 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.by Zarathruster
- 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
by wahnfrieden - 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.by yalue
- 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.
by jszymborski - 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 lightby perfunctory
- 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.by alexejb
- This is just the past and the modern propaganda nothing more.
- 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.by lemonberry
- 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.
by graemep - 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.by jhbadger
- 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?
by vkazanov - 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.
by __rito__ - 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.
by gaiagraphia - 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:by frogulis
- Are there any pages of French in “Crime and Punishment”?by eapriv
- 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
by david927 - Dunno. I can't read Russian for shit (pre-kindergarten level, I'd guess), but it seems like cheating to read it in English.