The Brothers Karamazov Fyodor Dostoevsky This eBook was designed. By Fyodor Dostoevsky Translated from the Russian by Richard Pevear.

THE BROTHERS KARAMAZOV. Brothers Karamazov (1879-80). Karamazov, a landowner well known in our district in his own day, and still re. Winner of the Pen/Book-of-the-Month Club Translation Prize The Brothers Karamasov is a. By Richard Pevear and Larissa. The Brothers Karamazov.

Richard Pevear

I have no idea how Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky’s translation of The Brothers Karamazov came to be regarded as definitive. Let me rephrase that.

Fourteen thousand copies a year, practically indefinitely, is why. There’s a lot of money at stake, for them and for their publisher. What I don’t know is how. Admittedly, their method is a publicist’s dream come true.

Anna Karenina Richard Pevear Audio

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. (He hasn’t mastered the language himself, not even at a conversational level, which is why I feel comfortable criticizing their work so harshly. I may not know Russian—but neither does Richard Pevear.) The result, as you might imagine, is a fairly close replication of the original. The promotional material practically writes itself. No one has ever offered a truer approximation of Dostoevsky’s prose!

P & V are like Gillette razors—you just can’t get any closer! Unfortunately, the result is not something you would want to spend 974 pages with. When I decided to tackle The Brothers Karamazov last month, I chose my translation the obvious way: I pulled up Amazon previews for half a dozen versions and compared the opening pages and tables of contents to see which one grabbed me.

Here are a few chapter headings from the Oxford World Classics translation by Ignat Avsey, the one I ended up going with: Second Marriage, Second Brood An Unseemly Encounter A Careerist Seminarian Here’s what P & V have: Second Marriage, Second Children An Inappropriate Gathering A Seminarist-Careerist That last one is especially offensive to the ear of a native English speaker. They make a worse blunder in the scene where Mrs. Khokhlakov is explaining to Alyosha that Dmitry might opt for a temporary-insanity plea. “Suppose we have a person who’s perfectly sane, and suddenly he’s suffering from diminished responsibility,” is what Avsey has her say. “Come to think of it, who doesn’t suffer from diminished responsibility these days? Don’t you, don’t I? We all do.” P & V translate the crucial phrase as “fit of passion”—“Who isn’t in a fit of passion these days?” That’s readable (unlike “seminarist-careerist”), but utterly wrong.