The Brothers Karamazov: A Novel in Four Parts With Epilogue

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This new, revised edition of the award-winning translation of Dostoevsky's classic novel celebrates the author's two hundredth birthday Winner of the Pen/Book-of-the-Month Club Translation Prize The Brothers Karamazov is a murder mystery, a courtroom drama, and an exploration of erotic rivalry in a series of triangular love affairs involving the "wicked and sentimental" Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov and his three sons-the impulsive and sensual Dmitri; the coldly rational Ivan; and the healthy, red-cheeked young novice Alyosha. Through the gripping events of their story, Dostoevsky portrays the whole of Russian life, its social and spiritual striving, in what was both the golden age and a tragic turning point in Russian culture. 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. For this bicentennial edition, Pevear and Volokhonsky have revised and refined their translation and continued their ongoing project of translating the great author's work. It is an achievement worthy of Dostoevsky's last and greatest novel.

Reviews

"[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 to us a work we thought we knew, subtly altered and so made new again." --Donald Fanger, Washington Post Book World

"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 translation--beginning to come home to the English-speaking reader." --John Bayley, The 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

"Far and away the best translation of Dostoevsky into English that I have seen . . . faithful . . . extremely readable . . . gripping." --Sidney Monas, University of Texas

Author Bio

Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky were awarded the PEN/Book-of-the-Month Translation Prize for The Brothers Karamazov and have together translated three other Dostoevsky novels-Crime and Punishment, Notes from the Underground, and Demons-as well as Gogol's Dead Souls and, to great acclaim in 2001, Tolstoy's Anna Karenina.