Greetings, everyone, and welcome to the first installment of our Dkos Book Club for Fyodor Dostoevsky’s classic The Brothers Karamazov. Hopefully everyone has their copies handy and is ready to go. I’m know some of you have already started, and others were waiting for the group to begin: either way, great! And if you’d like to join us, welcome aboard: feel free to jump in at any time. If you have any questions about how this book club will work, please refer back to the announcement diary.
Each week, I’ll start with a few notes and comments related to the reading — some history, some context, some criticism — followed by a couple of questions for discussion, and then our next reading “target”. Of course, you’re welcome to skip all this if you just want to dive into the discussion.
So, without further ado...
notes and comments:
I don’t want to lead off with a big infodump of history and context (What do I look like, a Russian novelist?), because the book is already intimidating enough. I’ll dribble out some of that information over the next few weeks, especially when it becomes relevant to the sections in question. Instead, and as a way of easing new readers into the novel, I thought I’d tackle the subject that’s oft-cited as the reason new readers are intimidated when it comes to Russian literature...
Yep, I’m talking about names. Why do all the characters seem to have ten different, unrelated and unpronounceable names?
Well, it turns out, there’s a good reason for it. Much like in English (where an “Edward Smith” can be “Edward”, “Mr. Smith”, “Ned”, or “Eddie”, depending on who’s doing the talking), the permutations of Russian names are meaningful, so it’s good to have some sense of how they work. Let’s take the central figure of TBK, Aleksei Fyodorovich Karamazov.
As in English, the first name (Aleksei) is fairly neutral, the kind of thing you might use if you considered yourselves equals with no particular relationship. Writers often use this version of the name in storytelling because it’s the most content-neutral (especially if, as in TBK, we have multiple members of the same family — Aleksei, Ivan, Dmitri, Fyodor — and thus can’t use the last name alone).
The first name is also the source of diminutives, and just as with English nicknames, they can be wildly different from the original name (Margaret → Peggy?!), but also shaded with different levels of closeness. So a colleague or a neighbor might call Edward “Ned,” which is friendly but not overly familiar, while “Eddie” might be reserved for someone very close or very young. Similarly, a name like Aleksei might give us a more common, friendly nickname like “Alyosha” or a variety of more emotionally shaded diminutives like “Alyoshka,” “Lyoshenka,” “Lyoshechka,” etc.
There are two things that make this a bit trickier in Russian than in English: 1. these shades of differences are more pronounced (and it’s easy to overstep your boundaries and be too familiar, or use one with a condescending root), and 2. Russians apply these diminutives to everything, including inanimate objects. The title of TBK’s first book is “История одной семейки,” where Dostoevsky uses a diminutive form of the word for “family”. English isn’t equipped to translate that word accurately: Garnett just skips over it and uses “family”; McDuff has “a certain little family” and P/V has “a nice little family.”
The middle part of a Russian name is called the patronymic, which takes your father’s first name and adds a suffix that means either “son of” (-ovich) or “daughter of” (-ovna). Patriarchy in action! Our hero, Aleksei Fyodorovich, is thus “Aleksei, son of Fyodor.” This has social consequences, too, since one of the main characters of TBK is born to a single mother with no official acknowledgment of who his real father may be...
It also serves a formal function. In English, where we might use “Mr. Smith” to indicate formality, Russians tend to use the first name + patronymic, which is one of the reasons these Russian novels seem so heavily burdened with long names. This is, however, the most basic polite form of address: “Good afternoon, Aleksei Fyodorovich” is equivalent to saying, in English, “Good evening, Mr. Karamazov.” Students use this form with teachers, young people with elders, and in any social situation where some degree of formal distance and respect is required, so expect to see it a lot.
Finally, the last name is used in pretty much the same way it’s used in English: in official documents, sometimes in neutral narration (“And then Karamazov showed up...”), sometimes ironically and even dismissively (“Hey, Karamazov, who invited you?”) But because titles like “Mr.” are far less common in Russia, it’s very rare to see it used to indicate respect except as part of the full, formal name (“Allow me to introduce Aleksei Fyodorovich Karamazov...”)
There is one aspect of last names that can trip people up, though: Russian names are gendered, which means that male and female last names, even within the same family, are different. For consonant-ending names, we usually just add an -a: Mr. Karamazov and Mrs. Karamazova. For names ending in -sky, we usually change that to -skaya, so Mr. Dostoevsky and Mrs. Dostoevskaya. (This famously gives translators of Anna Karenina a headache.)
Hopefully this doesn’t seem too overwhelming: it’s a pretty straightforward system, and once you get a sense of how it works, you’ll start seeing how and why Dostoevsky switches from one form to another to accomplish certain goals. In Book 1, we already see “Aleksei,” “Aleksei Fyodorovich” and “Alyosha” (Unfortunately, to keep from confusing new readers, most translators don’t bother with the “Lyoshas” or “Lyoshechkas” that pop up from time to time, so we lose some of that nuance. But that makes it less intimidating for English readers.)
Hopefully this helps!
Questions for discussion:
I’m going to assume most first-time readers haven’t started the book yet, so why don’t you share with us what experience you might have with Russian literature already? Have you read any other Dostoevsky, or Tolstoy (or Chekhov, Pushkin, Turgenev, Akhmatova, or anyone you’d like to talk about)? What are some qualities of the literature that may have stood out to you?
If you have started the book and/or are joining us for a re-read, how is it going so far? Are there any tips you’d like to share with new readers? TBK is, fairly or unfairly, a book with a reputation for difficulty, so please feel free to share your impressions (without, preferably, spoilers about events in the book!)
For next week:
This is our first meeting, so we don’t yet have a clear sense of how much time people will need. Why don’t we shoot for finishing Book 1 (“History of a [Certain/Nice Little] Family”) by next Monday? It’s pretty self-contained, not overly long or difficult, but it’ll still give us enough meat for discussion.