Russian novel question

[Anonymous]

I haven’t read any of the Russian literary classics-where should I start? Thank you for any recs!

[Anonymous]

Anna Karenina!

[Anonymous]

I would start small, with Gogol's The Nose, The Overcoat, Diary of a Madman

then maybe Dostoyevsky's Notes from the Underground building up to his Crime & Punishment

Anna Karenina is a HUGE book, vast, so not one to start with.

[Anonymous]

Gogol short stories + Dead Souls

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Anna Karenina!

+1
First Russian novel I ever read and loved it.

[Anonymous]

I loved Crime and Punishment. I would just find a guide online because it can get confusing at first with how the characters are referred to. There’s a lot of “nickname” vs. formal name usage that makes sense in Russian but wouldn’t be intuitive to an English speaker - think of like a character called Elizabeth who’s called Betty by her parents or whatever, we know that as a nickname but a non-English speaker maybe wouldn’t and would get confused like who’s this Betty all of a sudden.

[Anonymous]

Pushkin and Babel’s short stories

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I loved Crime and Punishment. I would just find a guide online because it can get confusing at first with how the characters are referred to. There’s a lot of “nickname” vs. formal name usage that makes sense in Russian but wouldn’t be intuitive to an English speaker - think of like a character called Elizabeth who’s called Betty by her parents or whatever, we know that as a nickname but a non-English speaker maybe wouldn’t and would get confused like who’s this Betty all of a sudden.

I started with Crime and Punishment and I couldn't keep any of the characters straight. It soured me on any Russian literature to this day.

[Anonymous]

Brothers Karmazov is excellent. I’m reading Anna Karenina right now and it’s good!

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Brothers Karmazov is excellent. I’m reading Anna Karenina right now and it’s good!

Karamazov omg

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I loved Crime and Punishment. I would just find a guide online because it can get confusing at first with how the characters are referred to. There’s a lot of “nickname” vs. formal name usage that makes sense in Russian but wouldn’t be intuitive to an English speaker - think of like a character called Elizabeth who’s called Betty by her parents or whatever, we know that as a nickname but a non-English speaker maybe wouldn’t and would get confused like who’s this Betty all of a sudden.

I started with Crime and Punishment and I couldn't keep any of the characters straight. It soured me on any Russian literature to this day.

If you read it with a study guide like a high school student it will make a lot more sense I promise. It does also kind of start slow too and takes awhile to get going.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I loved Crime and Punishment. I would just find a guide online because it can get confusing at first with how the characters are referred to. There’s a lot of “nickname” vs. formal name usage that makes sense in Russian but wouldn’t be intuitive to an English speaker - think of like a character called Elizabeth who’s called Betty by her parents or whatever, we know that as a nickname but a non-English speaker maybe wouldn’t and would get confused like who’s this Betty all of a sudden.

I read an edition of Brothers Karamazov (think it is the Pevear-Volokhonsky translation) that includes a helpful primer at the beginning on Russian diminutives, and how they really aren’t translatable into English. Good thing I read the note first. Otherwise I wouldn’t have realized that Alyosha, Lyokha, Lyosha, and Alexei are the same person! 😝

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Anna Karenina!

I'm listening to a great audio version of this narrated by Maggie Gyllenhaal. I'm not sure how, but there's something she does that is helping me keep all of the similarly-named-but-actually-different characters clear in my head!

[Anonymous]

Try a collection of Chekhov's short stories / plays. A good on ramp to the Russians and wonderful in their own right.

[Anonymous]

I prefer Gogol. Dead Souls, which is about a scam artist, is hilarious.