The Brothers Karamazov: A Novel in Four Parts With Epilogue

Product Information

I live in a small college town in central Vermont, where during a normal academic year, the college provides ample opportunities for cultural enrichment: concerts, plays, films, lectures, and so on. But then came the pandemic: the students had been sent home, the library was closed (books could still be fetched for faculty, but there was no browsing or schmoozing). I found myself in need of a project.

Shepherd Express: “ The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky, translated by Michael R. Katz” by David Luhrssen Absolutely faithful . . . Fulfills in remarkable measure most of the criteria for an ideal translation . . . The stylistic accuracy and versatility of registers used . . . bring out the richness and depth of the original in a way similar to a faithful and sensitive restoration of a painting.”– The Independent I went ahead with my experiment: to read the McDuff (Penguin) almost straight after the Pevear and Volokhonsky. I'm only a fifth in, but I know I'm a convert to the David McDuff. His language seems richer to me. To the best of my understanding, the Kropotkin translation is just Garnett’s translation with some parts changed and some parts left out.Until their translation of The Brothers Karamazovwas published in 1990, the English-speaking world got its Dostoevsky (their preferred spelling—with one y) from the great British translator Constance Garnett. Though her translations of Turgenev and Chekhov are generally considered virtuosic, her versions of Dostoevsky, Gogol, and Tolstoy have drawn criticism for Victorian elision. Her Gogol translations are “dry and flat, and always ­unbearably ­demure,” complained Nabokov. “The reason English-speaking readers can barely tell the difference between Tolstoy and Dostoevsky is that they aren’t reading the prose of ­either one,” grumbled Joseph Brodsky. The critic Korney Chukovsky summed it up best and most brutally when he wrote, “Who does not feel the convulsions, the nervous trembling of Dostoevsky’s style? ... But with Constance Garnett it becomes a safe bland script: not a volcano, but a smooth lawn mowed in the English manner—which is to say a complete distortion of the original.” For her part, Garnett once wrote, “Dostoievsky is so obscure and so careless a writer that one can scarcely help clarifying him.” For much of the nineteenth century, Russian literature lived, in the minds of most Western Europeans, behind, well, a curtain. The curtain was ornately embroidered with images of bears, onion domes, and noble savages untainted by logic. Russians, D. H. Lawrence wrote, “have only been inoculated with the virus of European culture and ethic. The virus works in them like a disease. And the inflammation and irritation comes forth as literature.” The most inflamed Russian writer was said to be a man called Dostoyevsky. His hatred of Western Europeans only added to his mystique. Garnett has, apparently, been criticized for skipping some paragraphs and writing in a style very typical of Victorian England. I was worried about this at first, but then remembered that Dostoyevsky’s style – which, to some degree, was conspicuous in all the various Dostoevsky translations I’ve read previously – is, in my opinion, one of his weaknesses. At his best, the plot, characters and philosophy are all wonderful, but I’ve often found the prose a bit repetitive, not very beautiful and somewhat (forgive me!) adolescent in tone – which is quite jarring when the psychology is as insightful as it is. Dostoevsky’s greatest novel is a story of murder told with hair-raising intellectual clarity and a feeling for the human condition unsurpassed in world literature.

Yes, this is true. It’s also something to do with what a man I once knew said to me about his sister. It was the only thing he ever said about his sister, and what he said was that she played an imaginary board game with imaginary pieces. That was like the thing Henry James said about going up the stair and finding the one needful bit of information. A lot of what I write is about the need, the fear, the desire for solitude. I find the Brontës’ joint imagination absolutely appalling. So, in a sense, the whole thing was, as you rightly say, a construct and a smokescreen.

Success!

First published as a complete novel in 1880 following serialization in 1879 and 1880, The Brothers Karamazov was first translated into English in 1912. The original translation of The Brothers Karamazov by Constance Garnett has been revised and reissued several times. In addition to the Garnett translation, there have been seven other translations, five of which are still in print. Richard Pevear was living in Manhattan in the mid-nineteen-eighties when he began reading “The Brothers Karamazov.” He and his wife, a Russian émigrée named Larissa Volokhonsky, had an apartment on the fourth floor of a brownstone on West 107th Street. To earn money, Pevear built custom furniture and cabinets for the emerging executive class in the neighborhood. He had always earned just enough to get by: in New Hampshire, he cut roses in a commercial greenhouse; he worked in a boatyard repairing yachts. He’d published verse in The Hudson Review and other quarterlies, and he’d worked on translations from the languages he knew: French, Italian, Spanish. He’d translated poems by Yves Bonnefoy and Apollinaire, and a philosophical work called “The Gods,” by Alain, a teacher of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone Weil. Extracts have been included below so that you can see how the different translations sound. The Brothers Karamazov: Other Info and Resources Fyodor Dostoevsky’s final novel, published just before his death in 1881, chronicles the bitter love-hate struggle between a larger-than-life father and his three very different sons. The author’s towering reputation as one of the handful of thinkers who forged the modern sensibility has sometimes obscured the purely novelistic virtues—brilliant characterizations, flair for suspense and melodrama, instinctive theatricality—that made his work so immensely popular in nineteenth-century Russia.

There’s a very strong picture in your second novel, The Game, of childhood creativity, but I have the feeling that there’s an element of the smokescreen to it. It’s quite an accurate portrait of what the Brontës got up to, isn’t it? McDuff: "Ivan's sights are set higher than that. Ivan would not be tempted even by thousands. Ivan isn't in quest of money, or peace of mind. He may possibly be in quest of torment."I chose not to follow the translations of my predecessors; however, on occasion I did engage with them critically, especially in the particularly complex passages, believing that literary translation is in reality an enterprise in which a translator builds on the work of his/her predecessors. If Garnett could come up with the perfect English counterpart, who was I to reject it and use a less appropriate phrase? There have been twelve translations of The Brothers Karamazov so far. I found complete audio versions of 3 of them (shown in bold below). Join Book Club: Delivered to your inbox every Friday, a selection of publishing news, literary observations, poetry recommendations and more from Book World writer Ron Charles. Sign up for the newsletter. Pevear and Volokhonsky made it clear that their work is a collaboration—her Russian, his