I'm reading this at the moment (I seem to have been reading it forever and a day, what is it with Russian novels and length?) and a few things confused me.
Firstly the amount of names each character seems to be referred to by, I am assuming its because its translated from Russian and it would be like referring to a character named "Joe" as Josepth or the like in English.
Secondly occassionally the first letter of a word appears and then a dash - is this to do with Soviet censorship or is it just stylistic? (Given its a recent reprint of the translation I can't fathom why (if it is censorship) certain words are still "blanked out".
