The Brothers Karamazov: Translated by Richard Pevear & Larissa Volokhonsky

Product Information

While Larissa was still living in Russia, she learned English, sat in on a translation seminar, and, using a smuggled copy of The New Yorker, translated a story by John Updike. The translation is… fine, though I’ve had to read some sentences multiple times, and some word choices strike me as off (e.

Not knowing Russian, I simply made some spot comparisons among these three texts, and the differences struck me as minor. Dostoevsky is] at once the most literary and compulsively readable of novelists we continue to regard as great . Their division of labor was—and remains—nearly absolute: First, Larissa wrote out a kind of hyperaccurate trot of the original, complete with interstitial notes about Dostoyevsky’s diction, syntax, and references.bring out the richness and depth of the original in a way similar to a faithful and sensitive restoration of a painting. Her father was paralyzed, and when Constance was just fourteen her mother died of a heart attack from the exertion of hoisting her husband from chair to bed. Gary Saul Morson, a professor of Russian literature at Northwestern, compared this tone-deafness to “someone translating Paradise Lost from English into Russian who had somehow missed that Milton was a Christian. Pevear and Volokhonsky are famous for reinventing Dostoyevsky’s translated language, and we can sense it in just this small text. Those three are from the page preceding the famous “Rebellion” chapter, if you would like to check the context.

Conservative outlets are perfectly placed to deflate that sort of manufactured conventional wisdom, because they live at the outskirts of the high-brow world. There is something about the rhythm and choice of words that appeal to me, and that helps me understand the characters. For a contemporary reader, though, these endorsements may carry a slightly negative charge, causing “The Brothers Karamazov” to sound offputtingly intellectual, one of those books you’re supposed to read despite its being a slog.The typescripts of Nabokov’s lectures, which he delivered while teaching undergraduates at Wellesley and Cornell, are full of anti-Garnett vitriol; his margins are a congeries of pencilled exclamations and crabby demurrals on where she had “messed up. There’s also an exceptionally charming vignette in which a little boy and his younger sister debate where babies come from. 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. 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.

In the emotionally lacerating “Rebellion,” Ivan tells Alyosha that he has collected news clippings of the tortures inflicted upon small children. Khokhlakov, a wealthy woman, always tastefully dressed, was still young and very pretty; she was rather pale, with very lively, almost black eyes.

This award-winning translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky remains true to the verbal inventiveness of Dostoevsky’s prose, preserving the multiple voices, the humor, and the surprising modernity of the original. 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 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.

He knew that if he didn’t finish ‘The Gambler’ on time he would lose the rights to all his future books for the next nine years. By using LibraryThing you acknowledge that you have read and understand our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy.Oh, y-yes, that’s what I am saying,” he picked up stubbornly, “two heads are much better than one head. Observing it all, the silently morose Ivan appears to disdain everything and everyone, himself included.