Description
Female representations in translating Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment
The novel, like many other Dostoyevsky’s works presents a subtle multi-layer depiction of characters. The author, who believed that moral principles may be more developed in women than in men, placed great emphasis on the female characters in the novel. The aim of the study is a comparative analysis of the discoursal portraits of Sonia Marmelandova, Katerina Ivanovna and Alyona Ivanovna in the Russian ST with their representations in four Greek and three English versions of Crime and Punishment. The research examines identity formation, in the context of Brewer’s and Gardner’s (1996) theory of identity and confirms the hypothesis that identity levels undergo transformati¬on in the TTs, which leads to a partial shift in the representation of the female figures. Analysis of naturalistic and elicited data, namely of the discoursal portraits of the heroines confirm linguistic relativity in the way the author's ideas and unique style are transferred. The significance of the study is that the comparison of the representation of female figures highlights the peculiarities of identity formation in the Russian culture and its transfer to the English and Greek contexts. Keywords: Dostoevsky, female figures, Crime and punishment, theory of identity.
