The Brothers Karamazov: Translated by Richard Pevear & Larissa Volokhonsky

Product Information

When Alyosha presents us with Zosima’s life and works in Book Six, or when he sees his miraculous dream during Father Zosima’s funeral in Book Seven, I tried to be mindful of this rich high-style source and render it with my own elevated language. Since 1940, just after Nabokov’s arrival in the United States, Wilson and Nabokov enjoyed a warm friendship, a constant Dear Volodya–Dear Bunny correspondence full of mutual instruction, jocular competition, oneupmanship, and traded enthusiasms. The song is about a series of men who come courting the singers, and their reasons for accepting or rejecting their advances.

Literally, it’s a flimsy paper back and I don’t know how well it’ll stand up to being carried around for the next two months. Alyosha waved to the coachman from the doorway, and the carriage that had brought the doctor drove up to the front door. Nabokov is in the habit of introducing any job of this kind which he undertakes by an announcement that he is unique and incomparable and that everybody else who has attempted it is an oaf and an ignoramus, incompetent as a linguist and scholar, usually with the implication that he is also a low-class person and a ridiculous personality, Nabokov ought not to complain if the reviewer, though trying not to imitate his bad literary manners, does not hesitate to underline his weaknesses. Tolstoy made the writing of Stephen Crane on the Civil War seem like the brilliant imagining of a sick boy who had never seen war but had only read the battles and chronicles and seen the Brady photographs that I had read and seen at my grandparents’ house. As a conservative Russophile Christian, Dostoevsky hoped his novel would be a theodicy, a justification of the ways of God to man, but as an artist he gives equal weight to the atheistic and empiricist worldview.Elsewhere they have “stupid” where Avsey has “absurd,” “brief” where he has “direct,” and “be healed by you” where he has “be redeemed through you. Her fourteen-year-old daughter, whose legs were paralyzed, had been unable to walk for six months and had to be pushed around in a wheelchair. The gypsy, for example, is a no-go because “ He’ll turn out to be a thief / And that, I’m sure, will bring me grief. While I certainly enjoyed rereading “ The Brothers Karamazov” in this well-designed Liveright edition, I suspect that almost any modern translation will convey the deeply felt humanity, as well as the majesty, of Dostoevsky’s final masterpiece.

In the following chapter, “The Grand Inquisitor,” Ivan then relates the gist of a poem he has composed.You must be prepared for anything,” said the doctor in emphatic and incisive tones, and dropping his eyes, he was about to step out to the coach. She worked with such speed, with such an eye toward the finish line, that when she came across a word or a phrase that she couldn’t make sense of she would skip it and move on.

I was wondering, since so many in this group own it, which translation you would recommend or which is the best? I eliminated what I considered unnecessary repetition of words, including Russian names (first names, patronymics, and diminutive forms), and rely on pronouns, synonyms, and other devices to vary the word choice. The English version has to imply how the verse would have ended , leaving the translator no choice but to decide what he thinks the missing text is, using context clues and his own intuition (mostly the latter).

Also, Volokhonsky said, “Dostoyevsky doesn’t use slang, really, though sometimes there is a vulgarism. Some people find this reinvigorating, while others shudder at the thought of translators trying to improve the language of Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, and more. In the Garnett translation, she had overlooked the joke and instead of repeating the word prepared, had written “about to step out to the coach.

As late as 1957, at one of our last meetings, we both realized with amused dismay that despite my frequent comments on Russian prosody, he still could not scan Russian verse. None of his books, not the early Russian-language novels written in France and Germany or the later works, written in English when he lived in the United States and Switzerland, were approved by the authorities. In Dostoevsky there were things believable and not to be believed, but some so true they changed you as you read them; frailty and madness, wickedness and saintliness, and the insanity of gambling were there to know as you knew the landscape and the roads in Turgenev, and the movement of troops, the terrain and the officers and the men and the fighting in Tolstoy. This book has many English translations, and I have gone back and forth between them before ending in the Oxford World’s Classics version, translated by Ignat Avsey as “The Karamazov Brothers. Nobody can deny that “The Brothers Karamazov” can be prolix and repetitive, partly because it initially appeared over the course of two years as a magazine serial.I am sitting one morning in my study, a white-haired old man, when there walks into the room a blooming young man, whom I should never have recognised, but he held up his finger and said, laughing, ‘Gott der Vater, Gott der Sohn, and Gott der heilige Geist. Or they never get that far: until the King James commission, English translators of the Bible were sometimes burned at the stake or strangled—or, as in the case of William York Tyndale, both.