The Brothers Karamazov (Everyman's Library) - Hardcover

Dostoyevsky, Fyodor; Pevear, Richard

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0679410031 ISBN 13: 9780679410034

Publisher: Everymans Library, 1992

Synopsis

Dostoevsky's last and greatest novel, The Karamazov Brothers (1880), is both a brilliantly told crime story and a passionate philosophical debate. The dissolute landowner Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov is murdered; his sons - the atheist intellectual Ivan, the hot-blooded Dmitry, and the saintly novice Alyosha - are all at some level involved. Bound up with this intense family drama is Dostoevsky's exploration of many deeply felt ideas about the existence of God, the question of human freedom, the collective nature of guilt, the disastrous consequences of rationalism. The novel is also richly comic: the Russian Orthodox Church, the legal system, and even the author's most cherished causes and beliefs are presented with a note of irreverence, so that orthodoxy and radicalism, sanity and madness, love and hatred, right and wrong are no longer mutually exclusive. Rebecca West considered it 'the allegory for the world's maturity', but with children to the fore. This new translation does full justice to Dostoevsky's genius, particularly in the use of the spoken word, which ranges over every mode of human expression.

About this title

Review:

"[Dostoevsky is] at once the most literary and compulsively readable of novelists we continue to regard as great . . . The Brothers Karamazov stands as the culmination of his art-his last, longest, richest, and most capacious book. [This] scrupulous rendition can only be welcomed. It returns us to a work we thought we knew, subtly altered and so made new again." -Washington Post Book World

"A miracle . . . Every page of the new Karamazov is a permanent standard, and an inspiration." -The Times (London)

"One finally gets the musical whole of Dostoevsky's original." -New York Times Book Review

"Absolutely faithful . . . Fulfills in remarkable measure most of the criteria for an ideal translation . . . The stylistic accuracy and versatility of registers used . . . bring out the richness and depth of the original in a way similar to a faithful and sensitive restoration of a painting." -The Independent

"It may well be that Dostoevsky's [world], with all its resourceful energies of life and language, is only now-and through the medium of [this] new translation-beginning to come home to the English-speaking reader." -New York Review of Books

"Heartily recommended to any reader who wishes to come as close to Dostoevsky's Russian as it is possible." -Joseph Frank, Princeton University

With an Introduction by Malcolm V. Jones

Book Description:

'In this new translation one finally gets the musical whole of Dostoevsky's original' New York Times Book Review

About this edition

• Publisher: Everymans Library
• Publication date: 1992
• ISBN 10: 0679410031
• ISBN 13: 9780679410034
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 840