The Brothers Karamazov

About the book

In a small Russian district town lives Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov, a landowner who started with next to nothing and made money, a sensualist who calls himself an old buffoon. He left the three sons of his two marriages to be brought up by others. Now, grown, they come home one after another: Dmitri, a hot-tempered retired officer who is free with money; Ivan, a cold, brilliant writer; and Alyosha, twenty, a novice at the town monastery under the elder Zosima.

Dmitri quarrels with his father over his mother’s inheritance, and father and son want the same woman, Grushenka. Dmitri owes three thousand rubles to his fiancée, Katerina Ivanovna, and in his father’s house lies an envelope of three thousand rubles, sealed and inscribed “To my angel Grushenka, if she will come.” Ivan tells Alyosha that if there is no God, everything is permitted, and recites his poem “The Grand Inquisitor”; Alyosha writes down the dying elder’s last teachings. Then one night there is blood in the house, and the story moves from the monastery to a drunken night at a country inn, an all-night interrogation, and a courtroom the whole country is watching.

This complete English translation is made directly from Dostoevsky’s Russian. Russians call one person by many names, Alexei Fyodorovich, Alyosha, Alyoshka, Alyoshenka, and the choice is the distance between two people at that moment, so the English keeps the form the Russian uses in each place. Where a character moves between the formal and the familiar “you,” the English changes its register in that very sentence.

The narrator is a provincial chronicler of “our town,” and every “it seems” and “they say” of his is kept, as are the repetitions and breathless sentences of Dostoevsky’s people. The book’s key words, “strain,” “everything is permitted,” “all are guilty for all,” stay the same from beginning to end. Each of the 5,063 paragraphs of the Russian is one paragraph here, with fourteen short translator’s notes.