Fyodor Dostoevsky
The Brothers Karamazov: A Novel in Four Parts with Epilogue.
San Francisco: North Point Press, 1990. First edition. Translated and annotated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. 0865474222 xx/796 pages.
Volume, measuring approximately 6.5" x 9.75", is bound in red cloth, with stamped gilt lettering to spine. Book is like new, with firm binding, clean and bright interior. Dust jacket, with price of $29.95, is also like new, preserved in mylar cover.
"Dostoevsky's last, towering novel summed up his life and work. "The Brother Karamazov" has long been recognized as a zenith of Western art; seminal thinkers such as Freud and Einstein have acknowledged it as an encapsulation of philosophy, psychology, and humanity's struggle for faith and salvation. Yet as sheer story, the novel has an inexorable power and timeless appeal - the intrigue and passion of a mysterious murder, two love triangles leading to parricide, suicide, and madness, and a sensational trial."
In this completely new, fully annotated translation, widely anticipated and hailed by scholars for its restoration of the essential nature of Dostoevsky's prose, the diversity and brilliance of the masterpiece come forth as never before in English. The high and low of life is in constant, dazzling flux, portraying the depraved and dissolute father at odds with his milieu and his three sons, each driven by his own compulsion: Dmitri by passion, Ivan by intellect, and Alyosha by religious fervor. Together this family embodies Dostoevsky's vision of Russia in the 1870s and the conflicting forces within Russian life and the Russian soul. Through the greatness of his artistic gifts, Dostoevsky raises the conflict to the level of universal humanity.
Fittingly for the greatest family novel in literature, "The Brothers Karamazov" is a novel constructed of voices, speech that Dostoevsky renders with exuberance and humor, as well as pathos. The grand themes are expounded as the characters struggle valiantly, eloquently, and sometimes stupidly witht he tensions between suffering and salvation, guilt and freedom, Christ and the Devil, and ultimately good and evil. To accurately register such a polyphony of ideas as well as voices, Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky have stripped a way the prettifying stylistic varnishes of earlier translations and presented a Dostoevsky never more in command of tragicomedy than here. "Life is full of the comic and is only majestic in its inner sense," Dostoevsky wrote in a letter while working on the novel, and now, this translation - like the restoration of an old master painting - gives us a book that could encompass (mostly in the gorgeous babble of its indelible characters) every imaginable human behavior - ghastly, funny, murderous, saintly - and every corresponding transcendence. There is no book quite like it in literature, and until now no translation that makes this so wonderfully apparent."