The Brothers Karamazov: Translated by Richard Pevear & Larissa Volokhonsky

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A translation that has gained a lot of attention, positive as well as negative, is the one from Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. A man who lies to himself, and believes his own lies, becomes unable to recognize truth , either in himself or in anyone else, and he ends up losing respect for himself as well as for others. Herzenstube testifies that the mental abnormality of the defendant is obvious, because when he entered the courtroom he kept his eyes in front of him instead of looking to the left at the ladies, of whom he was a great admirer. In “Lectures on Russian Literature,” there is a facsimile of the opening pages of his teaching copy of the Garnett “Anna Karenina.

Volokhonsky’s sense of fidelity has obvious roots: she is confounded by any translation that has little sense of the original’s qualities as they play on a Russian ear and sensibility. Other admirers include two of the most provocative explorers of the human psyche: Friedrich Nietzsche, who declared the Russian author “the only psychologist from whom [he] had anything to learn,” and Sigmund Freud, who likened Dostoevsky’s dramatic imagination to Shakespeare’s. It is a work of restless energy and plenitude, filled with unexpected reversals and revelations, at once raucous and poignant, satirical and grand. Look to the best mysteries to solve as you lounge by the pool, take a refreshing swim through some historical fiction, or slip off to the cabana with one of our five favorite escapist reads. The Brothers Karamazov” is, to use Mikhail Bakhtin’s famous term, the most polyphonic of Dostoyevsky’s novels, the one with the most voices, tones, and textures braided into the text.

By using LibraryThing you acknowledge that you have read and understand our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy. Nabokov could not bear Arndt’s “Germanisms,” his freewheeling sacrifice of semantic accuracy for rhythmic “beauty.

The particulars take up the bulk of Wilson’s attack, though he closes with some lapidary tribute to Nabokov’s mini-essays on Pushkin’s period, cohort, and influences. I repeat: here there was no question of stupidity; the bulk of these madcaps are really quite sharp and clever — but plain muddle-headedness, and, moreover, of a peculiar, national variety. The Brothers Karamazov is a murder mystery, a courtroom drama, and an exploration of erotic rivalry in a series of triangular love affairs involving the “wicked and sentimental” Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov and his three sons—the impulsive and sensual Dmitri; the coldly rational Ivan; and the healthy, red-cheeked young novice Alyosha. In the Wichita Eagle, we got an amazing full-page review with the headline ‘ “ karamazoV” still leads creative way,’ ” Pevear said as we broke for lunch one day. There, he is visited by the Grand Inquisitor himself, who announces that the Christian savior will be burned at the stake the next day.

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.

Wilson may not care for this turn—I do not much care for it either—but it is silly of him to assume that I lapsed into a naïve Russianism not being really aware that, as he tells me, “in English you have to listen to something.I was studying the Russian language and had begun reading the great works of its literature in translation. She turned down an offer from Tolstoy’s close friends Louise and Aylmer Maude to collaborate on a translation of “War and Peace” and did it on her own.

In the beginning of ‘The Brothers Karamazov,’ in the note to the reader, there is the passage about ‘being at a loss to resolve these questions, I am resolved to leave them without any resolution. 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. A patient confidant of his long and hopeless infatuation with the Russian language, I have always done my best to explain to him his mistakes of pronunciation, grammar, and interpretation.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. 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. And yet he was a grateful and sensitive young man, oh, I remember him still as such a tiny boy, left alone in his father’s backyard, where he was running in the dirt without any shoes and just one button on his little britches.