The Brothers Karamazov: Translated by Richard Pevear & Larissa Volokhonsky

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Since nearly all of them lack the usual social filters, their conversations quickly morph into intimate, even shameful confessions.

Since 1940, just after Nabokov’s arrival in the United States, Wilson and Nabokov enjoyed a warm friendship, a constant Dear Volodya–Dear Bunny correspondence full of mutual instruction, jocular competition, oneupmanship, and traded enthusiasms. The English version has to imply how the verse would have ended , leaving the translator no choice but to decide what he thinks the missing text is, using context clues and his own intuition (mostly the latter). Put simply, Avsey’s language makes the text more direct and lands in my mind and heart in another way that the other translator’s texts do.Commentary’s literary section is top-notch, on par with what you’d find in places like The New Republic or the New York Review of Books, but because it is a conservative magazine, it will always be in some sense marginal to the world of the literary press. Some people find this reinvigorating, while others shudder at the thought of translators trying to improve the language of Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, and more. It speaks to me and deals with the questions that I wrestle with in my profession and in my own life. Their division of labor was—and remains—nearly absolute: First, Larissa wrote out a kind of hyperaccurate trot of the original, complete with interstitial notes about Dostoyevsky’s diction, syntax, and references. None of his books, not the early Russian-language novels written in France and Germany or the later works, written in English when he lived in the United States and Switzerland, were approved by the authorities.

For a contemporary reader, though, these endorsements may carry a slightly negative charge, causing “The Brothers Karamazov” to sound offputtingly intellectual, one of those books you’re supposed to read despite its being a slog. On the blank left-hand page, Nabokov has written a quotation from Conrad, who told Garnett’s husband, Edward, “Remember me affectionately to your wife, whose translation of Karenina is splendid. Katz — as an achievement comparable in scale and power to Homer’s “ Iliad,” Aeschylus’s “ Oresteia” and Dante’s “ Divine Comedy. Unlike Garnett, who started small and then worked her way up to the big, baggy monsters of Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy, Pevear and Volokhonsky began with the bulkiest and most complex masterpiece imaginable.Nabokov could not bear Arndt’s “Germanisms,” his freewheeling sacrifice of semantic accuracy for rhythmic “beauty.

Translated by Pevear and Volokhonsky, it beings with a short introduction by Dostoyevsky scholar Malcolm V.She worked with such speed, with such an eye toward the finish line, that when she came across a word or a phrase that she couldn’t make sense of she would skip it and move on. I know McDuff appeals to many who have English as their first language, but for me, it doesn’t take me all the way to a good understanding.

He who lies to himself and listens to his own lies reaches a state in which he no longer recognizes truth either in himself or in others, and so he ceases to respect both himself and others.P/V,” as they would come to be known in the academic journals, went to work on “The Brothers Karamazov. Dostoevsky is] at once the most literary and compulsively readable of novelists we continue to regard as great . Dostoevsky’s greatest novel is a story of murder told with hair-raising intellectual clarity and a feeling for the human condition unsurpassed in world literature. As an example, they referred to a passage in the novel where a pompous doctor comes to visit the boy Ilyusha, who is very sick and dying.