Karamazov Brothers (Wordsworth Classics of World Literature) - Softcover

F.M. Dostoevsky

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1840226153 ISBN 13: 9781840226157

Publisher: Wordsworth Editions Ltd, 2007

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 disatrous consequences of rationalism. The novel is also richly comic: the Russian Orthodox Church, the legal system, and even the authors most cherisehd 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 Doestoevsky's genius, particularly in the use of the spoken word, which ranges over every mode of human expression.

About this title

Review:

Dostoyevsky paints like Rembrandt, and his portraits are artistically so powerful and often so perfect that even if they lacked the depths of thought that lie behind them and around them, I believe that Dostoyevsky would still be the greatest of all novelists. Andre Gide"

"Dostoyevsky paints like Rembrandt, and his portraits are artistically so powerful and often so perfect that even if they lacked the depths of thought that lie behind them and around them, I believe that Dostoyevsky would still be the greatest of all novelists."--Andre Gide

Synopsis:

This title is translated by Constance Garnett, with an Introduction by A.D.P.Briggs. As Fyodor Karamazov awaits an amorous encounter, he is violently done to death. The three sons of the old debauchee are forced to confront their own guilt or complicity. Who will own to parricide? The reckless and passionate Dmitri? The corrosive intellectual Ivan? Surely not the chaste novice monk Alyosha? The search reveals the divisions which rack the brothers, yet paradoxically unite them. Around the writhings of this one dysfunctional family Dostoevsky weaves a dense network of social, psychological and philosophical relationships. At the same time he shows - from the opening 'scandal' scene in the monastery to a personal appearance by an eccentric Devil - that his dramatic skills have lost nothing of their edge."The Karamazov Brothers", completed a few months before Dostoevsky's death in 1881, remains for many the high point of his genius as novelist and chronicler of the modern malaise. It casts a long shadow over D.H.Lawrence, Thomas Mann, Albert Camus, and other giants of twentieth-century literature.

About this edition

• Publisher: Wordsworth Editions Ltd
• Publication date: 2007
• ISBN 10: 1840226153
• ISBN 13: 9781840226157
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 896