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The Brothers Karamazov: A Novel in Four Parts With Epilogue

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Yes, there are free audiobooks at Librivox, produced by volunteers from public domain translations. There are three different versions: one is collaborative (read aloud by different contributors in charge of producing different chapters) and two are solo (read entirely by a single contributor). All three are based on the Constance Garnett translation (see below). The Brothers Karamazov: Translation History Pevear and Volokhonsky have won the pen Translation Prize twice, for The Brothers Karamazovand Anna Karenina. Pevear, who has also translated French and Italian works, is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature at the American University of Paris. In addition to translating Russian contemporary poets, Volokhonsky, who attended Yale Divinity School, has translated theological texts into Russian. They have two trilingual children. Finally, I have tried to distinguish between two kinds of repetition. It seems to me that the Russian ear is much more tolerant of repeated words and phrases than the Anglo-American ear. A literal translation of all the author’s repetitions would be too tedious. So you want to read Fyodor Dostoevsky’s last novel, the first half of a planned two-part project, a deep dark tale inspired by personal tragedy that explores faith, philosophy, and morality, and you don’t read Russian. Until their translation of The Brothers Karamazov was published in 1990, the English-speaking world got its Dostoevsky (their preferred spelling—with one y) from the great British translator Constance Garnett. Though her translations of Turgenev and Chekhov are generally considered virtuosic, her versions of Dostoevsky, Gogol, and Tolstoy have drawn criticism for Victorian elision. Her Gogol translations are ‘dry and flat, and always ­unbearably ­demure,’ complained Nabokov. ‘The reason English-speaking readers can barely tell the difference between Tolstoy and Dostoevsky is that they aren’t reading the prose of ­either one,’ grumbled Joseph Brodsky. The critic Korney Chukovsky summed it up best and most brutally when he wrote, ‘Who does not feel the convulsions, the nervous trembling of Dostoevsky’s style? . . . But with Constance Garnett it becomes a safe bland script: not a volcano, but a smooth lawn mowed in the English manner—which is to say a complete distortion of the original.’ For her part, Garnett once wrote,’Dostoievsky is so obscure and so careless a writer that one can scarcely help clarifying him.’ ”

Heartily recommended to any reader who wishes to come as close to Dostoevsky’s Russian as it is possible.”–Joseph Frank, Princeton University A. S. Byatt lives and writes in her handsome west London house and, in the summer months, in her house in the south of France. Both are filled with art, predominantly by her contemporaries, libraries of extravagant, Borgesian range and curiosa of many kinds, hinting at her unusual fecundity of mind: exotic preserved insects, the intricate examples of Venetian millefiori glassware and objects rare and fascinating of all imaginable varieties. The impression given by her houses is confirmed by her conversation, which moves confidently between literature, biology, the fine arts, and theoretical preoccupations and displays a mind turned always outwards. She is not a writer one can imagine being tempted to write a memoir: solipsism is not in her nature. Wyatt, Edward (7 June 2004). "Tolstoy's Translators Experience Oprah's Effect". New York Times . Retrieved 2008-04-23. Anyway, kudos to all who were involved in producing this work. Rendering one of the all time world’s best writer’s masterpiece unto sound is no small task, and you all rose to the very high occasion. I salute you! The Brothers Karamazov is the first work they translated together. They had a hard time finding a publisher to sponsor the project, but eventually got an offer from North Point Press and a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Separately, Pevear has also translated works in French, Italian, Spanish, and Greek, including The Three Musketeers. About the Pevear and Volokhonsky translation of The Brothers Karamazov

Are any of the audiobooks abridged? Why are the running times different?

I think it takes a lot of confidence and gusto to imbue so much personality into these famous fictional characters, and Mr. Thompson seems to treat it like a Royal Shakespearean Thespian, but not in a bombastic or overdone way. I am a huge fan of audio books, and Luke Thompson’s performances in this one is truly a tour de force. I would say he does nearly as much heavy lifting as the translator, who also does an amazing job. Of course, I have only heard one translation, but a spot comparison seemed to indicate that this McDuff version is better than the older more commonly found one. Well, I tend to say I wrote nothing as an undergraduate. But, in fact, I sat there in most of the lectures I went to, which weren’t many, writing this novel very obsessively and extremely slowly. And knowing it was no good, and knowing I didn’t want to write a novel about a young woman at a university who wanted to write a novel, and equally knowing I didn’t know anything else, and hadto write that sort of novel . . . 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. I know why. 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. 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! Whenever a McDuff phrase strikes me I look up the P&V, and McDuff has won in the great majority of cases.

Absolutely faithful . . . Fulfills in remarkable measure most of the criteria for an ideal translation . . . The stylistic accuracy and versatility of registers used . . . bring out the richness and depth of the original in a way similar to a faithful and sensitive restoration of a painting.”– The Independent One day, when Richard was reading “Karamazov” (in a translation by one of Garnett’s epigones, David Magarshak), Larissa, who had read the book many times in the original, began peeking over her husband’s shoulder to read along with him. She was outraged. It’s not there! she thought. He doesn’t have it! He’s an entirely different writer! I can’t tell you whose voice you’ll enjoy spending 30 hours with; that’ll depend on your personal preference. You’ll probably want to listen for yourself before deciding. 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] new translation–beginning to come home to the English-speaking reader.”– New York Review of Books For much of the nineteenth century, Russian literature lived, in the minds of most Western Europeans, behind, well, a curtain. The curtain was ornately embroidered with images of bears, onion domes, and noble savages untainted by logic. Russians, D. H. Lawrence wrote, “have only been inoculated with the virus of European culture and ethic. The virus works in them like a disease. And the inflammation and irritation comes forth as literature.” The most inflamed Russian writer was said to be a man called Dostoyevsky. His hatred of Western Europeans only added to his mystique.

Do they still sell audiobooks on CD?

On the fateful day, Smerdyakov urges Ivan to go see about some business in a town called Chermashnya, before outlining how heated the conflict between Dmitry and his father had become—indeed, that it was likely to come to a head that night. “So why did you,” Ivan asks him, “after all this, advise me to go to Chermashnya? If I leave, see what happens here.” Smerdyakov answers cryptically: “Precisely so, sir.” Sensing a plot, Ivan has a spasm and breaks into a fit of laughter, a sound associated in the novel with the Devil. Still, he goes. Pevear and Volokhonsky made it clear that their work is a collaboration—her Russian, his If you want to learn about all the translations, please visit What’s the best translation of The Brothers Karamazov? Are any of the audiobooks abridged? Why are the running times different? Richard Pevear was living in Manhattan in the mid-nineteen-eighties when he began reading “The Brothers Karamazov.” He and his wife, a Russian émigrée named Larissa Volokhonsky, had an apartment on the fourth floor of a brownstone on West 107th Street. To earn money, Pevear built custom furniture and cabinets for the emerging executive class in the neighborhood. He had always earned just enough to get by: in New Hampshire, he cut roses in a commercial greenhouse; he worked in a boatyard repairing yachts. He’d published verse in The Hudson Review and other quarterlies, and he’d worked on translations from the languages he knew: French, Italian, Spanish. He’d translated poems by Yves Bonnefoy and Apollinaire, and a philosophical work called “The Gods,” by Alain, a teacher of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone Weil. Humiliated and Insulted (aka The Insulted and Humiliated, The Insulted and the Injured, Injury and Insult)

Larissa always says that if it hadn’t been for 107th Street, we’d never have been married. When I moved to New York, I took up cabinetmaking. That’s how I earned a living. Among the unabridged versions, the running times are different not because some text is missing but because the narrators naturally speak at different speeds. Over the course of a book, small differences add up. Lithub: “The Quiet Rebels of Russian Translation: In conversation with Larissa Volokhonsky and Richard Pevear” I eliminated what I considered unnecessary repetition of words, including Russian names (first names, patronymics, and diminutive forms), and rely on pronouns, synonyms, and other devices to vary the word choice. On the other hand, I do retain essential repetitions, those that have semantic importance, such as the heart-rending “lacerations” ( nadryvy), which comprise most of Book Four in the novel.Criticism” offers a wide range of scholarly commentary on The Brothers Karamazov from American, Russian, and European authors, eleven of them new to the Second Edition and two of them appearing in English for the first time. Contributors include Ralph Matlaw, Valentina Vetlovskaia, Seamas O’Driscoll, William Mills Todd, Vladimir Kantor, Edward Wasiolek, Nathan Rosen, Roger B. Anderson, Robin Feuer Miller, Horst-Jürgen Gerigk, Vladimir Golstein, Robert L. Belknap, Ulrich Schmid, and Gary Saul Morson. Fyodor Dostoevsky’s final novel, published just before his death in 1881, chronicles the bitter love-hate struggle between a larger-than-life father and his three very different sons. The author’s towering reputation as one of the handful of thinkers who forged the modern sensibility has sometimes obscured the purely novelistic virtues—brilliant characterizations, flair for suspense and melodrama, instinctive theatricality—that made his work so immensely popular in nineteenth-century Russia.

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