The Brothers Karamazov: Translated by Richard Pevear & Larissa Volokhonsky

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When it came to Russian literature, the correspondence between Nabokov and Wilson was rather like that between an amused, patient teacher and an eager, overreaching student. This word—-where he sent his head-—I’ve forgotten,” he went on waving his hand in front of his eyes, “ah, yes, spazieren. It speaks to me and deals with the questions that I wrestle with in my profession and in my own life. For example, he uses profiltrovat’sya—‘to filter through,’ say, into a society—or stushevat’sya, which Dostoyevsky seems to have invented, meaning ‘to efface yourself out. I am sitting one morning in my study, a white-haired old man, when there walks into the room a blooming young man, whom I should never have recognised, but he held up his finger and said, laughing, ‘Gott der Vater, Gott der Sohn, and Gott der heilige Geist.

As late as 1957, at one of our last meetings, we both realized with amused dismay that despite my frequent comments on Russian prosody, he still could not scan Russian verse. Finance is provided by PayPal Credit (a trading name of PayPal UK Ltd, Whittaker House, Whittaker Avenue, Richmond-Upon-Thames, Surrey, United Kingdom, TW9 1EH).The one who lies to himself and believes his own lies comes to a point where he can distinguish no truth either within himself or around him, and thus enters into a state of disrespect towards himself and others. But perhaps you will find something, if not in the vocabulary then in the patterns of speech or the way the phrases are constructed. She would finish a page, and throw it off on a pile on the floor without looking up, and start a new page.

Everyman’s Library pursues the highest production standards, printing on acid-free cream-colored paper, with full-cloth cases with two-color foil stamping, decorative endpapers, silk ribbon markers, European-style half-round spines, and a full-color illustrated jacket.Not long before publishing his own “Onegin,” Nabokov took to the pages of The New York Review of Books and, like the lepidopterist he was, picked the wings off a translation by Walter Arndt—which, to his rage, went on to win the Bollingen Prize.

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.Fyodor Dostoevskys 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. One 8-year-old boy, having accidentally injured a rich landowner’s favorite hunting dog, is stripped naked, told to run and quickly torn to pieces by the rest of the pack before his mother’s horrified eyes. P/V,” as they would come to be known in the academic journals, went to work on “The Brothers Karamazov. In 16th-century Spain, Jesus Christ suddenly appears in Seville, heals a blind man, raises a girl from the dead, and then immediately finds himself arrested and thrown into prison. Karamazov was an ambitious choice for a fifteen-year-old, but one that spoke directly to the questions that mattered to me.

I’m not a huge fan of the cover art though; I am a basic bitch who prefers random 19th century paintings for my classics. For instance, they will not use an English word that the Oxford English Dictionary says came into use after the publication of the novel they are translating. 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.

Pevear is a mild, friendly man with a gray goatee and the sort of untraceable accent that comes off a little high-end.