Russian Names and the Associated Headaches

Last post I discussed the similarities between "Crime and Punishment," and the TV series "Death Note."

I have now finished the novel and I can tell you there are many other similarities, but today's post will focus on something else, that may seem a little random: Russian names.

One of the most attractive features of "Crime and Punishment," is the character development. Dostoevsky creates diverse, complex, interesting characters who interact with each other in meaningful ways, and I will discuss this next post.
However, as diverse as the characters may be in personality, they are not at all diverse in name.

Russian names make me feel like this:

I suppose in English we have a pretty simple system: you have your own, first name, and your last name is your family name or surname. Many people have a middle name.

In Russian, however...

Not only are their names impossible for English speakers to pronounce (ie: Svidrigailov, Zakharovich, Lebezyatnikov) each person has five billion of them, and they are called different names intermittently...okay, I may be exaggerating, but keeping track of the characters gets frustrating at times. Very frustrating.

I liked Linus' attitude about it: (here he is reading from another Dostoevsky novel, "The Brothers Karamazov.")

However, the Linus method doesn't work too well after a while because there are so many names and if you don't keep track of them, you have no idea who Dostoevsky is talking about when he describes someone.

Here is my piecemeal understanding of it:
In Russian, you have a family name,  your own first name, and a middle name (I think) but one of your names, the middle one, is taken from your father's name and therefore isn't fully yours.

For example, the main character's name is Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikov.  The first name, "Rodion," is his own name. The last name is a family name. The middle name is taken from his father's name - it works like this:

Boys:

Take father's first/ "original" name + ovich

Therefore, Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikov's father must have been called Roman. Rodion's own sons would be called "Rodionovich."

(Remember "A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch?" Ivan's father must have been Denis.  And if Ivan ever escaped the gulag, found a woman and made some babies, their names would be Ivanovna or Ivanovitch. )






Girls:

Take father's first/ "original" name + "ovna."

Rodion's sister, Dunia (Or Advotya- but we'll get to that later) has the middle name "Romanovna," since her father was also Roman.

Also, last names very often end in "ov" (Raskolnikov, Marmeladov) but not always (Luhzin, Razumihin).








So it still seems kind of simple, right? Wrong.
It gets worse because each person has their own nickname as well -_-

Romanovitch is also called "Rodya," by his mother, and his sister,  Advotya Romanovna Raskolnikov, is also called "Dunya."

This is further complicated by the fact that Dostoevsky will call his characters any of their names, often in conjunction, and that his characters will call each other different names depending on their relation to each other. For example, Raskolnikov is most often called Raskolnikov by the author in narration, but will often be called Rodion Romanovich by Dostoevsky as well. His sister and mother will call him Rodya, and other men commonly call him Rodion Romanovich and some of them just call him Raskolnikov.

Now compound that by every character in the book -_-

To make matters worse, many of the characters have the same name! The woman who was murdered was called Alyona Ivanovna, but another large character is Katerina Ivanovna, and the two have nothing to do with each other.

More confusing is the distinction between Porfiry Petrovich (Detective who psychologically questions Raskolnikov- Raskolnikov's "L") and Pyotr Petrovich (Dunya's jerkface suitor/fiancée sort of) who have very similar names but very different roles in the story. However there is also Ilya Petrovich who has a similar role to Porfiry Petrovich (both are law enforcement) but is not blood related to him.

Anyway it becomes a major headache, and since I want my next post to be about character development, I thought I'd save you the annoyance of sorting out the characters now (and if you want to read the book, this should be even more helpful). Below I have created a "relations" chart and provided my own, single name for each of them, which I will be using in the next post, so that it's easier to sort them out in your mind.  Any time Dostoevsky talks about someone and you don't know who he is referring to, just refer to the handy chart below. I have the easy name I chose for each character, and a below that is a list of their full names.
(Sorry it's hand drawn- I'm on the road and my ipad has surprisingly poor capability for making this kind of chart -_-)

1) Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikov "Rodya"
2) Advotya Romanovna Raskolnikov "Dunia"
3) Pulcheria Alexandrovna Raskolnikov
4) Sofya Semyonovna Marmeladov "Sonia"
5) Semyon Zakharovich Marmeledov
6) Katerina Ivanovna Marmeladov
7) Marfa something or other (I forgot 😞)
8) Arkady Ivanovich Svidrigailov
9) Pyotr Petrovich Luhzin
10) Dmitri Prokofych Razumihin
11) Andrei Semyonovich Lebezyatnikov
12) Zossimov
13) Porfiry Petrovich
14) Alyona Ivanovna
15) Lizaveta Ivanovna
16) Zametov
17) Ilya Petrovich

Nastasya Petrovna (Forgot to draw her in-Raskolnikov's maid)


I suppose it must be difficult simply because it's foreign to me- I'm sure a Russian person would feel annoyed reading an English book.

Well, that is it for this post. I think understanding the names is essential to understand the book.

A few more fun facts:

1) If this book is accurate about Russian culture (which I'm positive it is) the stereotype is not false!

Russians drink vodka for breakfast and cannot survive without it. I swear, they treat vodka like water in this book.

2) "Crime and Punishment," employs an interesting anonymity system- while it states the city (St. Petersburg), whenever Raskolnikov goes somewhere, Dostoevsky will say something like "Raskolnikov turned onto X-------- street," to keep the true street name anonymous.

3) If I had read this book before my 7th grade spelling bee, I would have won, because the word I lost on was "Samovar," which is a Russian tea kettle and is mentioned about 120382019 times in this book.