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First published as a World’s Classics paperback 1994
Reissued as an Oxford World’s Classics paperback 1998
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ISBN–13: 978–0–19–283509–3
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OXFORD WORLD’S CLASSICS
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OXFORD WORLD’S CLASSICS
FYODOR DOSTOEVSKY
The Karamazov Brothers
Translated with an Introduction and Notes by
IGNAT AVSEY
OXFORD WORLD’S CLASSICS
THE KARAMAZOV BROTHERS
FYODOR MIKHAILOVICH DOSTOEVSKY was born in Moscow in 1821, the second in a family of seven children. His mother died of consumption in 1837 and his father, a generally disliked army physician, was murdered on his estate two years later. In 1844 he left the College of Military Engineering in St Petersburg and devoted himself to writing. Poor Folk (1846) met with great success from the literary critics of the day. In 1849 he was imprisoned and sentenced to death on account of his involvement with a group of utopian socialists, the Petrashevsky circle. The sentence was commuted at the last moment to penal servitude and exile, but the experience radically altered his political and personal ideology and led directly to Memoirs from the House of the Dead (1861–2). In 1857, whilst still in exile, he married his first wife, Maria Dmitrievna Isaeva, returning to St Petersburg in 1859. In the early 1860s he founded two new literary journals, Vremia and Epokha, and proved himself to be a brilliant journalist. He travelled in Europe, which served to strengthen his anti-European sentiment. During this period abroad he had an affair with Polina Suslova, the model for many of his literary heroines, including Polina in The Gambler. Central to their relationship was their mutual passion for gambling—an obsession which brought financial chaos to his affairs. Both his wife and his much-loved brother, Mikhail, died in 1864, the same year in which Notes from the Underground was published; Crime and Punishment and The Gambler followed in 1866 and in 1867 he married his stenographer, Anna Snitkina, who managed to bring an element of stability into his frenetic life. His other major novels, The Idiot (1868), Demons (1871), and The Karamazov Brothers (1880), met with varying degrees of success. In 1880 he was hailed as a saint, prophet, and genius by the audience to whom he delivered an address at the unveiling of the Pushkin memorial. He died six months later in 1881; at the funeral thirty thousand people accompanied his coffin and his death was mourned throughout Russia.
IGNAT AVSEY is a freelance translator, critic, and lecturer. He has lectured in a number of British universities and in the States, and has written on Gogol, Dostoevsky, and Dmitry Merezhkovsky. His other translations include Dostoevsky’s The Village of Stepanchikovo (1983) and Insulted and Injured (2007).
CONTENTS
Introduction
Translator’s Note
Texts Used
Select Bibliography
A Chronology of Dostoevsky
Principal Characters
Time Chart
THE KARAMAZOV BROTHERS
From the Author
PART ONE
BOOK ONE THE STORY OF A FAMILY
1. Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov
2. The eldest son is packed off
3. Second marriage, second brood
4. The third son, Alyosha
5. Startsy
BOOK TWO AN UNSEEMLY ENCOUNTER
1. They arrive at the monastery
2. The old buffoon
3. Devout peasant women
4. Lady of little faith
5. Amen, amen!
6. A man like him doesn’t deserve to live!
7. The careerist seminarian
8. A scandalous scene
BOOK THREE SENSUALISTS
1. In the servants’ quarters
2. Lizaveta Smerdyashchaya
3. Confessions of a passionate heart. In verse
4. Confessions of a passionate heart. In anecdotes
5. Confessions of a passionate heart. ‘In free fall’
6. Smerdyakov
7. Controversy
8. Over a glass of brandy
9. Sensualists
10. Both together
11. One more ruined reputation
PART TWO
BOOK FOUR CRISES
1. Father Therapon
2. At his father’s
3. An encounter with some schoolboys
4. At the Khokhlakovas’
5. Crisis in the drawing-room
6. Crisis in the tenement
7. And in the fresh air
BOOK FIVE PROS AND CONS
1. Betrothal
2. Smerdyakov with a guitar
3. The brothers get to know each other
4. Rebellion
5. The Grand Inquisitor
6. Still very unclear
7. ‘It’s always interesting to talk to an intelligent person’
BOOK SIX A RUSSIAN MONK
1. Starets Zosima and his visitors
2. From the life of the Schemahieromonk Father Zosima, resting in the Lord, in his own words, as recorded by
Aleksei Fyodorovich Karamazov
3. Concerning the discourses and teachings of Starets Zosima
PART THREE
BOOK SEVEN ALYOSHA
1. Odour of putrefaction
2. Here’s an opportunity
3. A spring onion
4. Cana of Galilee
BOOK EIGHT MITYA
1. Kuzma Samsonov
2. Lurcher
3. Prospecting for gold
4. In the darkness
5. A sudden decision
6. Here I come!
7. The former and indisputable one
8. Delirium
BOOK NINE JUDICIAL INVESTIGATION
1. The beginning of civil servant Perkhotin’s career
2. Alarm
3. A soul’s journey through torments. First torment
4. Second torment
5. Third torment
6. The prosecutor catches Mitya out
7. Mitya’s great secret. He is made a laughing-stock
8. Witnesses’ evidence. The bairn
9. Mitya is taken away
PART FOUR
BOOK TEN SCHOOLBOYS
1. Kolya Krasotkin
2. Children
3. The schoolboy
4. Zhuchka
5. At Ilyusha’s bedside
6. Precociousness
7. Ilyusha
BOOK ELEVEN IVAN FYODOROVICH
1. At Grushenka’s
2. Painful foot
3. Little she-devil
4. The hymn and the secret
5. Not you, not you!
6. First visit to Smerdyakov
7. Second visit to Smerdyakov
8. Third and last visit to Smerdyakov
9. The Devil, Ivan Fyodorovich’s nightmare
10. ‘He said that!’
BOOK TWELVE JUDICIAL MISTAKE
1. The fateful day
2. Dangerous witnesses
3. Medical evidence and a pound of nuts
4. Fortune smiles on Mitya
5. Unexpected catastrophe
6. Prosecutor’s speech. Character sketch
7. Background history
8. More about Smerdyakov
9. Psychology let loose. Galloping troika. The prosecutor’s summing-up
10. Defence counsel’s speech. All things to all men
11. There was no money. There was no robbery
12. Neither was there a murder
13. Truth perverted
14. Trust the peasants!
EPILOGUE
1. Plans for Mitya’s escape
2. For a moment a lie becomes the truth
3. Ilyushechka’s funeral. The speech at the stone
Explanatory Notes
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I WISH to express my gratitude first of all to Antony Wood, in particular for his editorial input into my translation of the early Books, and also for his generous help and expert advice at all stages of this enterprise. I also wish to thank the Revd. Dr Gerald Bray for advice on ecclesiastical matters, and Daphne Percival, John Moloney, Ian Millard, Roger Heathcott, Guy Churchill, John T. Smith, John L. Smith, Simon Wilde, and Callum Wright for fruitful and always useful discussions covering a wide variety of pertinent topics. I am most grateful to Alex Poole for technical help in the production of the Time Chart.
Second impression, 1995: My grateful thanks to Neville Collins, Adolf Czech, and above all my sister Ina for a number of helpful comments and suggestions.
Eleventh impression, 2007: My gratitude to Peter Khoroche for his painstaking and perceptive reading of the text, leading to a number of important amendments and improvements.
For Irène
INTRODUCTION
IT is a commonly held view that Dostoevsky is an excessively pessimistic, even dour writer, obsessed with analysing the criminal tendencies of human nature, ‘heavy’ and difficult to read. But Dostoevsky stands out first and foremost as a reader’s writer, who always seeks to present his themes in a palatable form as an integral part of an absorbing plot in which humour is often a key element. He was never sure, however, of being able to win the critics over to his side, and to the very end of his life he remained decidedly on the defensive. In his correspondence with the Procurator of the Holy Synod, the formidable Konstantin Pobedonostsev, tutor to Aleksander III and to the future Tsar Nicholas II, Dostoevsky wrote: ‘I am coming to the end of The Karamazovs. This last part, I can see and feel this, is so unusual and different from what other people are writing that I definitely do not expect any plaudits from the critics.’1
Dostoevsky’s strong urge to shock the ‘genteel’ readership may provide a clue to his entire creative approach, may even be the principal factor in determining his choice of subject. Sigmund Freud argued that Dostoevsky’s preoccupation with the nether side of human nature stemmed from criminal tendencies in his own soul.2 This, surely, is to misjudge the tree by its fruit. An alternative explanation is that Dostoevsky acted on the principle of ‘why should the devil have all the best tunes?’, and, being a true artist with an eye for what is popular, he served his readers such fare as was calculated to satisfy their appetites. The price he had to pay was that Turgenev proclaimed him to be a latter-day de Sade, his fictional heroes became bywords for depravity and degeneration, and the Russian language was ‘enriched’ by such cult terms as Karamazovshchina and even Dostoevshchina, which are associated with sexual profligacy, violence, psychological deviation, and the breakdown of conventional morality. One of the eminent critics of his time, Nikolai Mikhailovsky, characterized him as a ‘cruel talent’. For Mikhailovsky, Dostoevsky’s heroes were mentally sick people, essentially clinical cases, whose experience could not further the understanding of the human condition. After his death, so powerful was the opposition ranged against Dostoevsky that he was virtually eliminated from his country’s cultural consciousness. In the tense and unstable political atmosphere marked by five unsuccessful attempts on the life of Aleksander II (assassinated at the sixth attempt, 1 March 1881), nothing was more calculated to go against the grain of the then politically correct thinking than the way in which Dostoevsky undermined the pillars of society in his mature novels. With the student-terrorist Dmitry Karakozov’s shot at the Tsar in 1866—the first of the five assassination attempts—still ringing in people’s ears, even the choice of the name ‘Karamazov’ seemed provocative. It was only twenty years after his death that Dostoevsky was finally culturally rehabilitated by the Russian Symbolists at the turn of the century, notably by V. Rozanov and Dmitry Merezhkovsky, thus paving the way for his popularity abroad.
Although a novelist, the mature Dostoevsky had less in common with Dickens, Balzac, Tolstoy, and Hugo than with the dramatists of earlier ages. The range and depth of the nineteenth-century novel was in the main limited to the analysis of external phenomena; man was seen as a social animal harmonious within himself, whatever his relationship with the outside world might be; he was free from the internal disharmony that afflicted Hamlet; free from the latent self-destructive forces that were unleashed in Othello; free from the irrational senile extravagance of Lear and the delayed, conceptualized carnality of Faust. Dostoevsky changed all that. He turned man in upon himself, dragged each man back into his own private universe ‘bounded by a nutshell’. For him, in the beginning was the thought. Dostoevsky’s heroes ‘feel deeply because they think deeply; they suffer endlessly because they were endlessly deliberative; they dare to will because they have dared to think’.3 Following on from the dramatists of the past, and basically using the tools of the dramatist, he demonstrated ‘how abstract thought may be passionate, how metaphysical theories and deductions are rooted not only in cold reason, but in the heart, emotions and will.’4 In this his art is of the future, a challenge and an invitation to the reader to enter the arena of debate and participate in the unfolding drama of ideas. ‘Faust and Hamlet think more but feel less than all others, act less because they think more’,5 their tragedy lies in the eternal co
ntradiction which they cannot resolve ‘between the passionate heart and passionless thought’.6 The two great tragic heroes in The Karamazov Brothers, Ivan and Dmitry, are both very much in the Hamlet mould. Ivan, the reformer manqué, cannot resolve the contradictions of the external world and he conjures up his own personal ghosts, first in the shape of the Grand Inquisitor, in the legend he composes and relates to Alyosha. Faced with Christ’s unexpected reappearance on earth, the Grand Inquisitor of sixteenth-century Seville can find no place for Him. Humanity’s supposed hope and refuge is made to listen in silence as the riot act is read out to Him and He is shown the door and humiliatingly told never to return and never to aspire to the glory of a sacrificial death—a verdict against the Son of God which for Ivan is a stab in the side; he, like Dostoevsky himself, loved Christ deeply, but only a suffering, crucified Christ.7 Man has firmly decided to become master of his own destiny. But it is in fact the small, select band of professional administrators who have been invested with the authority ‘to bind and to loose’, who will now take responsibility for the entire human race, rule the world according to their own laws, impose their own interpretation of good and evil, and countenance no interference from the Deity. For the sane person who has understood that this is the rule of the Devil, the only refuge is madness. The Devil himself is Ivan’s second personal ghost. He appears at night as a down-at-heel impecunious gentleman-lodger from upstairs, wearing a pair of no longer fashionable check trousers instead of ‘in a red radiance amid thunder and lightning and with blazing wings’, and sets his romantic Weltschmerz to naught, disorientates Ivan and casts him adrift in a sea of despair. He undermines Ivan’s analytical concern for humanity, its suffering, and even the suffering of children. In the face of cosmic upheavals to which he refers, and which themselves are inconsequential, what merit is there in agonizing over the atrocities perpetrated by man? Man will never cease revelling in cruelty and attempting to drown his conscience in a sea of cynicism.
In contrast to the rational Ivan stands the confused, delinquent figure of Dmitry Fyodorovich, also Hamlet-like, contradictory, universal, and at the same time quintessentially Russian. ‘Dangerous, emotional, irresponsible, yet conscience-haunted; soft, dreamy, cruel, yet fundamentally childlike. He is assassin and judge, ruffian and tenderest soul, the complete egotist and the most self-sacrificing hero … he fears nothing and everything, does nothing and everything. He is primeval matter, he is monstrous and soulful.’8 In extremis he matches Hamlet’s ruthlessness in every particular.
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