by Kristina McGuirk

Kristina McGuirk is a Master’s student in Library Studies and Archival Studies at the University of British Columbia and the #CP150 project Research Assistant. She previously worked as a writer and editor for Better Homes and Gardens special interest magazines. You can find her on Twitter at @kkmcguirk.

As the #CP150 research assistant, I provided social media and editing support for @RodionTweets. What this means in practice is that I collected the tweets from each scholar for their parts of the book, edited the tweets for consistency, voice, and style (more on that below), returned them with queries, and ultimately scheduled the section using Tweetdeck (Twitter’s free tweet management platform).

In the beginning, while the literary savvy people worked out who would tackle which parts of C&P, I put together a general “Twitter Style Guide” for the crew. This was largely to help those less comfortable with Twitter and to make sure we were all on the same page. Selfishly, it was also to make sure I wasn’t going to spend a lot of time on the more time-consuming/less impactful parts of editing tweets, such as cutting down the number of characters because of a photo, or turning long passages into multiple, numbered tweets (we learned on @YakovGolyadkin that style of conveyance was not particularly successful).

@RodionTweets official style guide

While working on the project, I’ve talked about being true to the nature of Twitter a lot. It was probably annoying. But I’m going to give it one last go here. As Sarah Hudspith discussed in her post, I struggled with the idea of revealing the murder on Twitter. There’s no practicality to it. (Does everyone remember the drug dealer’s Twitter woes on season one of Mr. Robot?). But Sarah’s rationale that Twitter provides Raskolnikov a medium for talking to himself, however, was spot on, and, I was convinced. If you looked back at my own tweets in the month leading up to our July 7 launch, I was pretty much live-tweeting what annoyed me while working in coffee shops and libraries—not all that different from Rodion or the rest of Twitter (except that most of us aren’t plotting to #murder a #louse).

Suspending my disbelief, I moved on to really editing the tweets. Tweets coming from six different people resulted in six different products that had to turn into one person’s thoughts… on Twitter. It wasn’t easy, but luckily almost everyone enjoyed directly quoting the book when possible, so the tenor of the writing was not wildly different (thanks again, Dostoevsky, Oliver Ready, and Penguin!). The biggest differences were in how many tweets each person produced for their parts, and how they chose to convey the thoughts. Some of the scholars were more succinct in their tweets, while others offered pages and pages of tweets for their sections. My job wasn’t to really worry about the how or why of what was included, but to make sure that the tweets were telling Rodion’s story in an engaging way that felt like Twitter.

Often Twitter is about randomly sharing what you’re thinking/seeing/doing; Rodion is great at cryptically oversharing!

I started by playing with punctuation, varying ?!?! and … and ? and . and sometimes—gasp—not even ending a tweet with anything, because Twitter is fast and loose like that.

I then made every effort to combine tweets. Repetition is a big part of C&P’s storytelling and Rodion’s thoughts, but using a lot of synonyms or adjectives in one sentence isn’t the most efficient way to get a tweet out. I was able to remove superfluous words and phrases pretty easily. (This was my journalism degree in action, while my English degree quietly stares at the wallpaper ignoring me.) Even certain tweets or parts of the novel were just disconnected enough from Rodion’s own narrative that I didn’t need to include them. The rest was a battle with between the 140-character limit on each tweet and the details and phrasing.

I also got tweets that were more narrative (natural as we were working from a novel): this happened, and then he said this, but what about that, and now he’s doing this, and I’m wondering about that. However, in Twitter, the direct narrative had to go away and the story had to be told through Rodion’s reactions. One way to do this was to edit for passive voice and narrative phrasing—Twitter is very much in-the-moment social media, so it definitely works for storytelling, but since each tweet comes at a different time, on a different line, you don’t need the textual cues. Sure, he was still tweeting some of what happened to give his interjections context, but we’re offering more of his thoughts than his retelling of what’s happening.

This is an altered text that I felt worked particularly well transitioning to Twitter.

Something I wish I would have tried earlier in the editing processes was modernizing the text a bit. While I did add gifs and a silly hashtag here and there (as did Katia Bowers), there was definitely a limit to what was too contemporary. At one point, Sarah Hudspith said she had to fight the urge to write “Sh*t! Got blood on my iPhone! #murderproblems” But… I wish we had done that! I wish I’d suggested early on using Twitter for the platform it is–#trending hashtags, feuds, and cat gifs. Sarah Young is right that an epic trolling session at the Crystal Palace would have been hilarious, but I also understand that this would have been a different way of engaging than we’d planned. I think if I were to do it again, I’d give myself more time for reimagining.

A missed opportunity! I desperately wanted to use this in Part 3, but it wasn’t appropriate for how we’d been using Twitter.

There are a couple lessons I learned regarding timing and characters (wouldn’t it have been more practical to refer to ‘Raz’ instead of Razumikhin the whole time?) but, ultimately, @RodionTweets was a success and really got me to think differently about a classic I hadn’t read since high school. It was such a creative way to engage with a text and I would encourage everyone to wonder what their favourite literary character’s Twitter looks like… except maybe Dickens’s Gong-Donkey, because I don’t know how to convey drunk braying with Twitter.

This is the last of a series of posts on the experience of creating @RodionTweets. You can follow the Twitter account here. The introduction to the series is here. Click here to read Part 6 or here to go all the way back to Part 1. More information about the #CP150 project can be found here.

This post has been cross-posted on All the Russias blog.

by Kate Holland

Kate Holland is an Associate Professor in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Toronto. Her book, The Novel in the Age of Disintegration: Dostoevsky and the Problem of Genre in the 1870s, was published in 2013. She is a founding member of the North American Dostoevsky Society’s Reader’s Advisory Board and tweets on @fyodor76.

Before the #CP150 Twitter project, I was a Twitter lurker, but when I was offered the opportunity to join a group of international Dostoevsky scholars tweeting Crime and Punishment from Raskolnikov’s point of view, I could not resist the temptation. I teach the novel almost every year, in a Dostoevsky course, a survey, and a first-year seminar called “The Criminal Mind,” and this seemed like a great opportunity to look at it anew, and to go outside my scholarly comfort zone in the process. I opted to tweet Part III, a key section of the novel. It includes Raskolnikov’s first meeting with the detective Porfiry Petrovich and the disclosure of his article “On Crime,” through which Dostoevsky reveals Raskolnikov’s “extraordinary man theory” for the first time. Here Dostoevsky seems to break with the ideas about Raskolnikov’s motives for the murder which he has been building throughout the first two sections of the novel and reveals the outlines of what ends up being his true motive. At the end of the section Raskolnikov begins to realize the nature of the “louse” that he has killed and the significance of his failure to take “the next step.” This section of the novel includes a lot of dialogue, some of which Raskolnikov is not present for, as well as a scene in which he is in a delirious state, which posed special challenges for the Twitter medium.

Crime and Punishment doodles

This Twitter project required three different modes of translation from the text: the most straightforward was direct transcription of Raskolnikov’s thoughts as conveyed by Dostoevsky and translated by Oliver Ready; the second mode was transposition of the text from third to first person in order to convey Raskolnikov’s thoughts as the context required; and the third was creative manipulation of the story by the addition of thoughts which might be conceivably ascribed to Raskolnikov. For a literary scholar like myself, fidelity to the text is second nature, thus the process of direct transcription posed no real problems. Transposition was also fairly easy; I am so used to teaching this text that I have an internal commentary on it in my mind which was easy to follow. The hardest part to get used to was adaptation, or “filling in” gaps which the text intentionally leaves opaque. Given that this novel was first conceived of in the first person and contains many passages which can be seen as “stream of consciousness” avant-la-lettre, it is a rich environment to be mined for tweets. At the same time, though a novice to the Twitter form, I was also aware of the great gap between “stream of consciousness,” where thoughts are conveyed in as unfiltered a way as possible, and tweeting, which involves a whole series of formal and social filters.

Crime and Punishment doodles 2

My biggest quandary was how to treat the conversation between Raskolnikov and Porfiry. Although we had agreed that our collective approach to the tweeting should be broadly consistent, and that Raskolnikov should only tweet what would be practically possible (that is, he would not be able to tweet during a conversation, for instance), the extraordinary man theory is so central to the Crime and Punishment’s ideological structure that it seemed important to include it in our Twitter translation of the novel. Raskolnikov’s idea that extraordinary men can “step over” the law for the sake of a great idea is key to his process of self-realization, and there was no question in my mind that it had to be tweeted in order to give ideological and philosophical coherence to our project. In this scene Raskolnikov’s tweets reflect his dialogue with Porfiry; he is presenting his ideas for a second time in the Twitter mode after they have been recited back to him by Porfiry with a new intonation. In the delirium scene at the end of Part III, it begins to dawn on Raskolnikov how far he has fallen short from the goal he set himself, how miserably his own squalid crime compares to the crimes of his hero Napoleon. Here I found that hashtags, one of the basic units of the Twitter toolkit, served to express his self-disgust quite appropriately in shorthand; I particularly liked #napoleoncomplex, #epicfail, and #lousenotnapoleon.

Our #CP150 Twitter project gave me a fresh perspective on Dostoevsky’s novel. The combination of the three modes of Twitter translation reminded me of the extraordinary complexity of Crime and Punishment’s narrative structure; I found myself constantly jumping between my three tasks as the narrative perspective moved in and out of Raskolnikov’s consciousness. It also revealed how much gets lost if we translate the novel entirely into Raskolnikov’s point of view and suggests some of the reasons why Dostoevsky may have rejected his original idea for first person narration in favor of a third person narrator. Here we lose Razumikhin as a moral counterweight to Raskolnikov, never guess at his burgeoning feelings for Dunya, and bypass Dunya and Pulkheria Alexandrovna’s response to their sudden meeting with Sonya. We are trapped instead in Raskolnikov’s monomania. While we trace the vacillations of his self-deception and self-revelation, those psychological developments are never embedded into a broader moral or social context. Followers of @Rodiontweets will find themselves trapped in Raskolnikov’s perspective with no narrative respite. In this format the novel’s psychological claims emerge more clearly than its moral or ideological ones. In our Western cultural context this is perhaps quite appropriate, since the novel is best known for its psychological portrait of a criminal which influenced philosophers, writers and film directors from Nietzsche and Freud to Hitchcock and Cronenberg, rather than its moral and spiritual redemption narrative.

This is part 3 of a series of posts on the experience of creating @RodionTweets. You can follow the Twitter account here. The introduction to the series is here. Click here to read Part 2, or here to go on to Part 4. More information about the #CP150 project can be found here.

To learn more about the manuscript doodles pictured here, read the article on Open Culture here: Dostoevsky Draws Doodles. These images are borrowed from that post.

This post has been cross-posted on All the Russias blog.

by Sarah Hudspith

Sarah Hudspith is an Associate Professor in Russian at the University of Leeds. Her book, Dostoevsky and the Idea of Russianness, was published in 2004. She is co-director of the Leeds Russian Centre and manages Dostoevsky Now, a public engagement project for exploring Dostoevsky in the world today through events, discussion and online resources. She tweets on @SarahHudspith.

When Katia Bowers first approached me to take part in the #CP150 Twitter project, I was very excited. As an undergraduate student, my first experience of Dostoevsky had been Crime and Punishment: it was an experience that began a life-long love affair, but it also put paid to a hidden dream – to write fiction myself. For how could I possibly write a novel that would ever come close to Dostoevsky’s? Now, I was being offered the chance to (re)write a part of that very novel myself, to put myself almost into Dostoevsky’s shoes and to experience the creation of a new kind of Raskolnikov. How could I refuse?

When I learned that the parts of the novel would be divided between the contributors, I also knew straight away which part I wanted to cover: the first part, in which the murder takes place. On the one hand it was quite a daunting responsibility to draw out of the text (in Oliver Ready’s masterful translation) the voice needed to attract followers to the beginning of the story. But on the other hand, I felt that Part One presented the most fascinating challenges that might have a contemporary relevance: how might a murderer use social media to reflect on his/her crime, in the run-up to it and its immediate aftermath? We live in an age where many people feel compelled to broadcast their lives online, to create a narrative of themselves which can become more real than the intimate, offline self. Raskolnikov is a character searching for an identity for himself: is he an intellectual, a philanthropist, a pioneer of a new morality, a sensualist, a beloved son and brother, a criminal? What parallels could be drawn between his anguished self-seeking, when put into the context of a Twitter account, and the contemporary mediation of personal identity? Further, social media are increasingly platforms for the propagation of ideologies and their distillation into ever more extreme forms, indeed are sadly the venue for publicising horrific crimes in the name of a so-called ‘new word’. The idea of a Twitter account for Raskolnikov presented intriguing issues around the interface between public and private and brought them into clearer focus for me.

Decoration of Dostoevskaya Metro station in Moscow

The public/private question arose quite quickly when considering how much @RodionTweets should say about the murder, assuming a natural desire not to be found out, which is (despite moments to the contrary) Raskolnikov’s attitude in the novel. I reflected on how much of Part One Raskolnikov spends wandering the streets of St Petersburg, talking aloud to himself, seemingly unconcerned or at least oblivious as to whether he is overheard, and I felt this could be equated to the contemporary tendency to ‘talk’ to social media, almost forgetting its very public nature. So for me, Twitter became the medium via which I imagined Raskolnikov talking ‘aloud’ to himself, and it became natural to tweet, for example, Raskolnikov’s full realisation of the ugly horror of his intention: “God! Will I really actually take an #axe, start bashing her on the head, smash her skull to pieces? Will I really slip in sticky warm blood?” Although Raskolnikov asks himself these kinds of questions, openly and unguardedly away from the privacy of his garret room, it is not tantamount to a public confession, an admission of the responsibility for taking human life. That comes much later.

Allied to this question was the problem of spoilers. One aim of the project is to bring new readers to Dostoevsky; how much should we give away? Dostoevsky originally conceived of Crime and Punishment as written in the first person, but eventually switched to a third person narration which allowed him greater control over the development and revelation of Raskolnikov as a character, contextualising his thoughts with flashbacks and memories. A Twitter account, on the other hand, is as relentlessly linear as real life lived minute by minute. But I reasoned that since first-time readers of the novel would experience it as a ‘why-dunnit’ rather than a ‘who-dunnit’, knowing all along that Raskolnikov was the murderer, then the Twitter account should be the same.

In a sense, the project has created the first person version of the text that Dostoevsky ultimately rejected, and this meant that we would lose those parts of the text governed by the impersonal third person narrator, namely when Raskolnikov is acting, rather than simply thinking or talking to himself. One challenge was whether to fill those gaps, and how to do so. I was wary of straying from the text, and I was mindful of the brief to think about when Raskolnikov might realistically be tweeting: for example, he would not be tweeting whilst in conversation with Razumikhin, but might tweet his thoughts about the conversation after the fact. Nevertheless, there were times when I felt there would be a loss of suspense, particularly during Raskolnikov’s frantic last-minute preparations for the murder, if @RodionTweets went silent. The prospect of being able to put words into Raskolnikov’s mouth was thrilling, but those words had to be chosen carefully to fit with the tweets based more closely on the text. Thus, I considered it plausible for @RodionTweets to beg the ether: “Where can I get an #axe at this time of day!”

The use of hashtags was encouraged, and though this might seem the most anachronistic aspect of the conceit of translating a 19^th-Century character into a 21^st-Century medium, I found that it helped to highlight an important part of Dostoevsky’s conception for Raskolnikov. At the earliest stages of envisaging the novel, he described in a letter to the editor Katkov his plan to write a story about a young man falling under the influence of “strange, ‘unfinished’ ideas afloat in the atmosphere” and committing a murder. I saw that the use of hashtags created a certain emphasis when added to words, and I felt that this would nicely suggest ideas and concepts afloat in the Twittersphere that were preying on Raskolnikov’s mind, even at an unconscious level. In this way, I could highlight the obvious #crime, but also #soul, #sacrifice, #fate and even #deadbody, adding a possibility of a double reading to the exclamation “Over my #deadbody!”

It has been tremendously rewarding to take part in this collaborative project. I did not expect at first that to do so would generate fresh perspectives on the novel, and I have been very satisfied at the way it has enhanced my understanding of the text. I look forward to the insights that will arise from the tweets pertaining to the remaining parts of the novel, and I hope that readers and Twitter followers will find it equally engaging.

This is Part 1 of a series of posts on the experience of creating @RodionTweets. You can follow the Twitter account here. The introduction to the series is here. Click here to go on to Part 2. More information about the #CP150 project can be found here.

This post has been cross-posted on All the Russias blog.

by Katherine Bowers

Katherine Bowers is an Assistant Professor of Slavic Studies at the University of British Columbia. She is working on a book about the influence of gothic fiction on Russian realism. She tweets about Russian writers and other interesting things on the account @kab3d.

One hot July 7 evening, a young man left his rented room to practice walking a murder route. This took place in the pages of Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment (1866). But this July 7, Twitter will witness another young man–or the same young man–leaving his room to trace a murder route. You can follow his adventures on the Twitter account @RodionTweets, which will begin tweeting the events of Crime and Punishment from Raskolnikov’s perspective on Thursday.

Tweeting Raskolnikov is no easy task. The account was the brainchild of Brian Armstrong and me, and has come together through the efforts of a crack team of intrepid and creative tweet miners: Brian, me, and also Sarah Hudspith, Sarah J. Young, Kate Holland, and Jennifer L. Wilson. Our ace Project Assistant, Kristina McGuirk, has done valiant editorial work, creating a single, cohesive, and (we hope) Dostoevskian voice in Twitter from disparate tweet mining styles. This project builds on the skills Brian, Kristina, and I learned while creating @YakovGolyadkin‘s voice during #TheDoubleEvent last November.

@RodionTweets in action!

The task of “translating” Raskolnikov’s voice into 140-character-or-less text snippets has sparked a number of fascinating conversations. They include whether it makes sense to “live tweet” the murder (#murdererproblems), what form of social media would Raskolnikov prefer (Snapchat, as the evidence disappears?), which animated gif best expresses the trauma of witnessing a horse beating in a dream, and, among others, the quintessential #dostoevskyproblem: how do you live tweet 3 days of delirious wandering? These questions and their answers have diverted us throughout the process of creating @RodionTweets, and so, throughout the month of July, as the various parts of the book are twitterified and published, each participant will write a blog post on one intriguing facet of his/her @RodionTweets experience. Stay tuned!

#delirium strikes even the most intrepid!

Oliver Ready’s new translation!

The @RodionTweets Team would like to thank Penguin Books US for giving us permission to use Oliver Ready’s wonderful new translation of Crime and Punishment as a source text for our project. We are also grateful to those who allowed us to use their images to illustrate the project, including Naftali Rakuzin, Scott Lindberg, and Sarah J. Young. For a full list of acknowledgments, click here.

@RodionTweets is part of a larger celebration of the 150th anniversary of Crime and Punishment taking place this summer and fall. Events include a summer reading group hosted by the North American Dostoevsky Society on Facebook (you can join them! they are starting Part 2 of the novel today!); an August Twitter novel adaptation film festival; library exhibits taking place in Toronto, Cambridge, and online; a series of blog posts forthcoming on The Bloggers Karamazov from Dostoevsky experts reflecting on different aspects of the novel; a panel on translation and language in Crime and Punishment at the University of Bristol in October; and a conference and film screening at the University of British Columbia in October.

The project “Crime and Punishment at 150″ is organized by Kate Holland and myself, and supported with funding from the North American Dostoevsky Society, the CENES Department at the University of British Columbia, Green College, UBC, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. The project also collaborates with a number of other partners, including the Petro Jacyk Central & East European Resource Centre at the University of Toronto, the Cambridge University Library, the Department of Russian at the University of Bristol, the Dostoevsky Now initiative at the University of Leeds, the British Association for Slavonic and East European Studies 19th-century Study Group, and Apocalypse Films.

This is the first in a series of blog posts about the creative twitter project @RodionTweets. The next blog post, on Part One, can be found here.