real deal game changer

Dropped it 3 times until I made this cheat sheet bookmark…world of difference…

I'm reminded of @_Billy_Beck_'s in-book journaling method.

I also found reading a chapter summary AFTER I read the chapter helpful, so I could piece together any of the confusing bits without ruining the story.

Awesome advice!! Just finished Crime and Punishment, and can't wait to get my copy of this one. I absolutely love your page, and always look forward to them notification alerts! THANK YOU!!

Chris - I just bought that book and Count of Monte Cristo which I am reading first! You inspired me - I never read these in school - I love reading now but used cliff notes in school unfortunately. I was always a science girl.

I think this applies to a lot of classics cause I've been reading The Count of Monte Cristo for three weeks (more than halfway done) and I did a similar character tree for it. No confusions anymore.

I believe my version had a character map somewhere in the index, and I've seen several of them online. Very helpful if you're not used to the Russian naming conventions.

I'm telling you it's them dang Russians going by 50 different names.

Great reading but Dostoevsky is very depressive. Try a Chesterton book afterwards, you´ll like it, I promise!

Sound like a good study aid too, and will encourage those who find the structure challenging to follow. Well done for passing on what you are learning as you go, carry on being an inspiration to that generation who have missed out the pleasure of reading. Enjoy!!!

Brilliant idea I'm gonna do this from now on with all my Russian authors haha

The Goat

Love your hair king

little to no effort, and it also help in analyzing main characters. I have done the same with War and Peace

@JoshPhillipsPhD have you seen this account?

Yeah haha, once I figured out how russian nicknames worked it also was a lot easier

What happened to Blood Meridian?

dropped it, i didn’t like it. i’ll revisit later

@DarkSummer777 What didn’t you like about it? Was gonna read it but now second guessing

@ChrisKindaReads I want to know what he didn't like about it also. Maybe the violence. It's the book that got me into literature and prose. I'd don't know prose was a thing until I read that book

So thankful you suggested this. I will start doing this right away with books that have lots of characters. Many years ago, I read halfway through War and had to put it down for a while, and when I picked it back up again couldn’t remember which character was which. Thanks

smart!

Understand how Russian names and class structure works, there’s only about 10 characters

i mean i pretty much got it down now. this is my 3rd russian classic i just wanted to help people out

I just started reading this today. Not too confusing yet.

That is such excellent advice! Handwriting ANYTHING grows your intellect; digitizing information destroys it:

These old Russian master writers have somewhat confusing list of characters, true. Good tip to do a map of them.

woah that was crazy

insane

first time hearing about it too. def finna check it out

This book is my favorite of all times, but sometimes I feel like it's 'Demons' of Dostojevski because it's funnier.

I’ve put this on my list to buy 😊

The chapter on the grand inquisitor 😱🫣❤️

I make character maps for some of the Japanese mysteries I read. Their surnames are often very similar. I wished I had made one when I read War and Peace. I looked up a character and saw a spoiler!

This is a cheat code for anyone reading complex storylines. So agree, writing the character map yourself, is better than a digital one.

Excellent advice

That’s a great idea. Especially for books with numerous characters. I wish most authors would provide this service.

You are the best

I'm 100 pages into that book rn, and need that map - good point - Brothers has a ton of characters and it gets confusing quick.

Also all these Russian novels have multiple nicknames for each person and at least 8 ppl are called Pasha!

That's such a great idea!!!