The Brothers Karamazov: A Novel in Four Parts With Epilogue

Product Information

A final version of the above writing is from Andrew R. MacAndrew and the Bantam Classic version, which also is pleasing to me: A translation that has gained a lot of attention, positive as well as negative, is the one from Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. Their version of the same text is: Earlier book covers for the Second edition had a brown, framed design; the current printings have the same cover image, but the design features a purple band across the bottom.

We actually met because of Russian literature. I had written an essay on the Soviet dissident and writer Andrei Sinyavsky. It was published in The Hudson Reviewin 1972. I remarked ironically that the poet Yevtushenko was giving readings in Madison Square Garden—among his translators were John Updike and Richard Wilbur—while Sinyavsky was in a Soviet labor camp. I received a letter from Irene Kirk, a professor at the University of Connecticut. She told me he wasn’t in prison, he had been released but also stripped of his citizenship and deported. She had helped him and his family leave for France. For the solo recordings, I’ve marked which narrators sounded British and which sounded American when I listened to the audio samples. A. S. Byatt lives and writes in her handsome west London house and, in the summer months, in her house in the south of France. Both are filled with art, predominantly by her contemporaries, libraries of extravagant, Borgesian range and curiosa of many kinds, hinting at her unusual fecundity of mind: exotic preserved insects, the intricate examples of Venetian millefiori glassware and objects rare and fascinating of all imaginable varieties. The impression given by her houses is confirmed by her conversation, which moves confidently between literature, biology, the fine arts, and theoretical preoccupations and displays a mind turned always outwards. She is not a writer one can imagine being tempted to write a memoir: solipsism is not in her nature. Wyatt, Edward (7 June 2004). "Tolstoy's Translators Experience Oprah's Effect". New York Times . Retrieved 2008-04-23.

Article contents

Pevear, Richard (14 October 2007). "Tolstoy's Transparent Sounds". New York Times . Retrieved 2008-04-23. So, you like audiobooks, or you think you might, and you’re not sure what your choices are, or which audiobook contains which translation.

A less imperious but no less discerning critic, Kornei Chukovsky (who was also a famous writer of children’s books), esteemed Garnett for her work on Turgenev and Chekhov but not for her Dostoyevsky. The famous style of “convulsions” and “nervous trembling,” he wrote, becomes under Garnett’s pen “a safe blandscript: not a volcano, but a smooth lawn mowed in the English manner—which is to say a complete distortion of the original.” Some critics praise the authenticity and accuracy of their work, while others find it rough and unappealing; much ink has been spilled in the debate.This translation, published in two volumes, is out of print. You may be able to find copies second-hand. In the early seventies, two young playwrights, Christopher Durang and Albert Innaurato, collaborated on a satire about nineteenth-century Russian literature called “The Idiots Karamazov.” In their liberal interpretation of Dostoyevsky, Father Zosima is a gay foot fetishist. Which causes the angelic monk Alyosha to wonder, “How can there be a God if there are feet?” The main character is based not on any figure in Dostoyevsky but, rather, on his first and most enduring English-language translator, a woman of Victorian energies and Edwardian prose, Mrs. Constance Garnett. When I arrived in the United States, I stayed for a while with this professor, and she started matchmaking. Succeeded after a while. Not immediately. Of course, the novel had been translated previously, once by the indefatigable Constance Garnett, who translated more than seventy works of Russian literature into serviceable English, beginning in the early 1910s; and by the popular Anglo-Russian pair, Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, who had been translating many Russian novels since the early 1990s. But I planned to do my best. 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.

Trachtenberg, Jeffrey A. "Translating Tolstoy", Wall Street Journal, November 17, 2009. Retrieved 2011-02-28. Translating Dostoevsky is different from rendering other authors into English. His prose is impassioned, fiery, and intense. Nothing in his novels ever happens “gradually” or “slowly.” His favorite adverb, frequently repeated in consecutive phrases, is “suddenly.” Similarly, his favorite adjective is “strange”: when he says something is strange, it is out of this world, beyond the range of common experience. These two examples provide quite a challenge for the faithful translator. I can start by comparing one of my favorite passages in the book, where they meet in the monastery, and Father Zosima sees right through Fyodor’s buffoonery. The original translation into English seems to be Constance Garnett’s: 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. They're reading Constance Garnett.'Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky have tried to restore, to recapture, some of the original Russian rhythm and nuance. They were not trying to make it simple, they were making it more ‘real.’” Well, I tend to say I wrote nothing as an undergraduate. But, in fact, I sat there in most of the lectures I went to, which weren’t many, writing this novel very obsessively and extremely slowly. And knowing it was no good, and knowing I didn’t want to write a novel about a young woman at a university who wanted to write a novel, and equally knowing I didn’t know anything else, and hadto write that sort of novel . . . Constance Garnett is a joke. Avoid at all costs. Here is a quote from her wikipedia article which summarizes why you shouldn't read her: Yes. We were neighbors with a wonderful, crotchety woman, an old translator from Russian, Mirra Ginsburg. She was a very good translator. We liked her. When we started to try to translate The Brothers Karamazov, we showed her samples. By then, Richard had translated some Russian children’s poetry. Richard’s very good at jingles. 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.

I repeat, it was not stupidity —the majority of these fantastical fellows are shrewd and intelligent enough—but just senselessness, and a peculiar national form of it.We work separately at first. Larissa produces a complete draft, following the original as closely as possible, with many marginal comments and observations. From that, plus the original Russian, I make my own complete draft. Then we work closely together to arrive at a third draft, on which we make our 'final' revisions." [8] There are large swaths of “The Brothers Karamazov” in which Dostoyevsky’s vices are on full display. His chauvinism and antisemitism (Fyodor’s avarice is attributed to his time in the Ukrainian city of Odesa, a Jewish enclave of the Russian Empire), dressed up in the language of Christian love, threaten to weigh the novel down with the flaws of its creator. But the structure of the book gives it a greatness that transcends the author’s smallness. The form of the detective story forces readers to look closely for clues, to pay attention to characters or objects we might be conditioned to ignore. You do not want to make the mistake that the Karamazovs made, of overlooking what was right under their noses—the forgotten son, the disregarded brother, Smerdyakov. Did he feel slighted, rejected by his father, to the point of murder? The prosecutor does not take him seriously as a suspect. “What was his motive? What did he hope to gain?” Kirillovich asks. After all, an illegitimate son cannot inherit. But Dostoyevsky himself attends to Smerdyakov, granting him, arguably, the central role in the family drama.