Product Description

Dostoevsky's last and greatest novel, The Karamazov Brothers (1880) is both a brilliantly told crime story and a passionate philosophical debate. The dissolute landowner Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov is murdered; his sons - the atheist intellectual Ivan, the hot-blooded Dmitry, and the saintly novice Alyosha - are all at some level involved. Bound up with this intense family drama is Dostoevsky's exploration of many deeply felt ideas about the existence of God, the question of human freedom, the collective nature of guilt, the disatrous consequences of rationalism. The novel is also richly comic: the Russian Orthodox Church, the legal system, and even the authors most cherisehd causes and beliefs are presented with a note of irreverence, so that orthodoxy, and radicalism, sanity and madness, love and hatred, right and wrong are no longer mutually exclusive. Rebecca West considered it the allegory for the world's maturity, but with children to the fore. This new translation does full justice to Doestoevsky's genius, particularly in the use of the spoken word, which ranges over every mode of human expression.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #182008 in Books
• Published on: 2007-03-05
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 896 pages

Customer Reviews

Phenomenal
The Karamazov Brothers is, quite simply, Dostoyevsky's greatest work. The characters are superb creations, the settings stunning and the pace is breathtaking. The book itself is a discourse on religion, existentialism, innocence and rationalism, and comes to some absolutely mindblowing conclusions. The chapter entitled 'The Grand Inquisitor' is the pinnacle of Dostoyevsky's career, beautifully constructed, stunningly written and with fantastic ideas.
The Karamazov Brothers is a difficult work, and it helps if you've read some of his other works before starting, particularly the Idiot and the Posessed/the Devils. This new translation is one of the best of its kind, and well worth buying over other editions. A helpful introduction, chronology and character list make this a great buy.

One of the greatest novels ever written
The Brothers Karamazov has to be Dostoevsky's crowning achievement(even surpassing The Idiot).The scope of this novel and the issues it confronts encapsulate everything great about nineteenth century russian literature.Not only is it, on one level, a murder story it is also a tale of such philosophical power it astonishes. Ivan's conversation with "the devil" and the death of Father Zossima are some of the most powerful and evocative passages ever written in the history of the novel.

Translation improves a classic in its English version
Dostoevsky is not to everyone's taste, and if you like your books to focus on the story you are unlikely even to finish The Karamazov Brothers. But as a way into Russian literature, and far and away the most readable of the philosophical literature genre, this book stands alone.

The brothers' different motivations and attitudes, and the complex way in which individual moralities interact on the stage of life, give this book its central thread and interest. We are privileged to see both the surface and the depths - which has the effect of holding a mirror up to ourselves as we react to the people and events.

This translation has a real freshness. This is flagged by changing the familiar rendering of the title as "The Brothers Karamazov" into its most obvious English form "The Karamazov Brothers." Am I the only person who had assumed the book involved a circus, based on the older version?

The point of the translation is not to simplify, but to prevent English from being a barrier in engaging with the text. In this it seems to have succeeded entirely - although of course as a non-Russian speaker I cannot vouch for the accuracy and appropriateness of the words chosen.

This is a winter novel - one to read in front of the fire and with friends or family to hand, and no hurry to complete it. It will lead you to question much that you take for granted - perhaps even yourself.