The Brothers Karamazov: Translated by Richard Pevear & Larissa Volokhonsky

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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. When the novel opens, Alyosha has been living in a nearby monastery as the disciple of the saintly, deeply humane monk Zosima, who preaches that one should never tell lies, especially to oneself, and that each individual is responsible for everyone else on Earth. Polyphonic in structure, “The Brothers Karamazov” deftly orchestrates numerous diverse voices as its principals argue about God, religion, love, the soul, poverty and much else. It is a work of restless energy and plenitude, filled with unexpected reversals and revelations, at once raucous and poignant, satirical and grand.

Through the gripping events of their story, Dostoevsky portrays the social and spiritual strivings in what was both a golden age and a tragic turning point in Russian history. Anyway, if my Mary Ann/Miranda trend continues, I should end up identifying with intellectual, atheist Ivan.When Nabokov was working on a study of Gogol, he complained, “I have lost a week already translating passages I need in ‘The Inspector General’ as I can do nothing with Constance Garnett’s dry shit. The Brothers Karamazov stands as the culmination of his art—his last, longest, richest and most capacious book. 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. When Dmitry grows besotted with the earthy Grushenka, his rich and coolly beautiful fiancée Katerina nonetheless refuses to give him up, largely out of vanity, even though she has come to love and be loved by Ivan. Although some translations can have a limited shelf life because their vocabulary grows obsolete and their syntax seems unnecessarily complex, I hope to have produced a version of The Brothers Karamazov that will engage the general public and students for some time to come.

Then, Richard, who has never mastered conversational Russian, wrote a smoother, more Englished text, constantly consulting Larissa about the original and the possibilities that it did and did not allow.

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. Heartily recommended to any reader who wishes to come as close to Dostoevsky’s Russian as it is possible. One head is good, but two are much better, but he did not meet another head with wits, and his wits went. Wilson who is not aware that there exists an analogous construction in Russian, prislushivat’sya k zvuku, “to listen close to the sound”—which, of course, makes nonsense of the exclusive Russianism imagined by him, and secondly, That is, a novel in which the hero strangles neither his father nor his mother, and in which there are no drowned bodies.

And then I remembered my happy youth and the poor child in the yard, without boots on his feet, and my heart was touched and I said, ‘You are a grateful young man, for you have remembered all your life the pound of nuts I bought you in your childhood. I’m intrigued by how this will play out with our Brothers K, especially with the narrator not-so-subtly telling us that Alyosha, the spiritual one, is the hero. And to the fidelity of transposal I have sacrificed everything: elegance, euphony, clarity, good taste, modern usage, and even grammar.There’s also an exceptionally charming vignette in which a little boy and his younger sister debate where babies come from. Though overshadowed by the tempestuous Dmitry and the charismatic Ivan, Alyosha was actually intended as the main focus of “The Brothers Karamazov. Gott der Vater, Gott der Sohn», и только забыл «Gott der heilige Geist», но я ему вспомнил, и мне опять стало очень жаль его. And yet, for a quarter century, despite any friction or jealousies, the friendship seemed to thrive on its directness.

We moved to France illegally on a tourist visa, and it was finally a policeman who told us that we needed to ‘regularize our situation,’ as he put it. I am a spiteful man”), but the sheer vitality, the thirst for life, that characterizes all the Karamazovs sweeps the reader irresistibly along. Fyodor Dostoevskys 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. 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. Richard Pevear was living in Manhattan in the mid-nineteen-eighties when he began reading “The Brothers Karamazov.

Because Dostoevsky learned much of his art from Gothic romances and those “horrid novels” so beloved by Catherine of Jane Austen’s “ Northanger Abbey,” he adopts many of their most sensational elements. I harp on the point that conservative magazines are well placed to dissent from this hype-driven feedback loop because, alas, they usually don’t. A husband-and-wife team, Larissa makes a literal translation as close to word-for-word as possible and then Richard tidies up her copy. Not knowing Russian, I simply made some spot comparisons among these three texts, and the differences struck me as minor.