I finally carved out a few days to get started on reading Anna Karenina (and I see from the forum posts that a few of you have too). And I ran smack into the problem that made it so hard to read the book the last time around: the names.

As I wrote earlier this year, meeting one Russian means having to learn a whole lot of names. There's a first name, accompanied by a patronymic (a middle name derived from the father's first name) and a last name. Sounds simple, right? But, as I pointed out, the first name usually has a half dozen nickname variations. And both the middle and last names change according to whether its holder is a man or a woman.

The first character we meet in Anna Karenina is Prince Stepan Arkadyevitch Oblonsky, and Tolstoy tells us that "in the fashionable world" he would be called Stiva. Several pages later, Stiva tells his valet that his sister Anna Arkadyevna will be arriving. And so the reader knows that, given their patronymic, their father's name was Arkady. A few chapters later, we lear that Stiva's siter is married to one Alexey Alexandrovitch Karenin. And so her full married name would be Anna Arkadyevna … (drumroll please) … Karenina.

So here's a quick rundown on the first names, nicknames, patronymics, last names and family ties of the key characters in Tolstoy's opus. I've printed them out in narrow column that I can use as a bookmark to keep track of everybody as I move through the book. The nicknames can be particularly troublesome because the Russian upper class at the time was infatuated with all things European, and so the nicknames are often English and not Russian:

--Prince Stepan Arkadyevitch Oblonsky: Nickname Stiva. Husband to Darya (a.k.a. Dolly), brother to Anna Arkadyevna Karenina.

--Darya Alexandrovna Oblonskaya: First introduced to the reader by her nickname, Dolly. Note the vowel changes between her last name and her husband's. She was born with the last name Shtcherbatskaya.

--Anna Arkadyevna Karenina: Prince Stepan's sister, and the title character. Married to Alexey Alexandrovitch Karenin.

--Alexei Alexandrovich Karenin: Anna's husband, and one of the wealthiest and most important men in St. Petersburg.

--Ekaterina Alexandrovna Shtcherbatskaya: Darya's youngest sister. Almost always referred to by her nickname, Kitty.

--Konstantin Dmitrievitch Levin: Old friend of Stiva's who is trying to woo Kitty. He has a semi-disgraced full brother, Nikolay Dmitrievitch Levin and an illustrious half brother, Sergey Ivanovitch Koznishev.

--Count Alexey Kirillovitch Vronsky: One of St. Petersburg's gilded young men. His interactions with Kitty and Anna, well, let's just say they set the plot in motion.