Comment by kelnos

11 hours ago

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.

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kelnos

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marttt  6 hours ago

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.)

kgeist  9 hours ago

I think it's the translators' fault. I think they could've added some footnotes like *Sasha - diminutive of Alexander.

K0balt  5 hours ago

This could be an LLM based e-reader feature, replace names with non-native intelligible translations.

nephihaha  11 hours ago

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.

  • sumeno  14 minutes ago

    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.

  • simiones  9 hours ago

    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.

  • NorthSouthNorth  10 hours ago

    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.