How to Meet the Characters of a Fictional World (Crime and Punishment) (Patreon)

19th Century novelists, like Dostoyevsky and Dickens, believed that your name determines your destiny.

That's why Pip flourishes and grows in Great Expectations. That's also why Raskolnikov, whose name means both "to cleave apart" and "split", sinks an axe into Alyona's head.

So when Marmeladov says, "Sonecha comes to us at dusk", if you know Sonya's name means "wisdom", you read that a little differently. You read the whole book in a new light. 

Let's talk about character creation as reader-writer collaboration, language learning hacks, and meet Raskolnikov, Sonya, Razumikhin, Svidrigailov, and the other characters of Crime and Punishment.

Topic timestamps:

• 0:00 why are names so important? 
• 0:30 my personal background and living in Japan 
• 2:50 your name determines your destiny 
• 4:00 character creation is a collaboration between reader and writer 
• 5:30 sculpture vs music vs novels  
• 6:00 how to "read" a Shakespeare play 
• 8:30 what to do if you're finding the names difficult  
• 9:30 language learning hacks (shadowing, spaced repetition, etc) 
• 12:50 Russian names: first name, patronymic, family name 
• 13:30 how to pronounce Turgenev and Tolstoy 
• 14:25 meeting Raskolnikov (name symbolism and pronunciation) 
• 18:00 meeting Sonya and Marmeladov (name symbolism and pronunciation) 
• 21:20 meeting Razumikhin (name symbolism and pronunciation) 
• 23:30 Svidrigailov (name symbolism and pronunciation) 
• 24:48 Luzhin, Lebezyatnikov, Alyona, Lizaveta  
• 26:30 what does your name mean?

Let me know:

What does your name mean?