Comment by fleebee
11 hours ago
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.