The Karamazov Brothers

by Fyodor Dostoevsky

  The motif of the duality of man’s nature and the alternation of good and evil has particularly influenced English writers. Robert Louis Stevenson (whose story Markheim is a version of Crime and Punishment) adopted the idea of the enemy within in his Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. The influence of Dostoevsky (and other Russian authors too) on writers such as Stevenson, Joseph Conrad, and D. H. Lawrence has been commented upon. The eminent contemporary Dostoevsky scholar W. J. Leatherbarrow includes George Orwell amongst their number;25 ‘… without the translations of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, even without translations of Turgenev and Chekhov, it is difficult to believe that the contemporary English novel could have become the thing it is.’26

  The Karamazov Brothers is a panorama of Dostoevsky’s most passionately held beliefs and ideas. The existence of God, the immortality of the soul, the freedom of man, the collective nature of guilt, the disastrous situation of a world operating without God, on rational principles alone (then ‘anything goes’) … These external questions are not only debated as propositions by Dostoevsky’s characters, they also underpin the action at a philosophical level. The Karamazov Brothers ranges over an immensely wide spectrum of human concerns: family ties, the upbringing of children, the relationship between Church and State, and above all everyone’s responsibility to others. Zosima preaches collective expiation through the awareness of collective guilt; Dmitry, in the traditional Christian sense, preaches collective expiation through the suffering of the innocent individual. The atheist Ivan is ready to see the disordered civic state subsumed under the authority of the Church; the saintly Alyosha is ready to leave the certainty of the Church for the turmoil of the world at large. In the discussions and debates the protagonists are aware of and deeply concerned with the cultural environment of the past and present; writers, philosophers, and poets are mentioned (Hugo, Proudhon, Diderot, Heine), indeed quoted at length (Schiller). Children, on whom a great deal of attention is lavished in the novel, are portrayed as enquiring, assertive individuals with a strong desire for an understanding of the world about them. In a characteristically immature manner they involve themselves amusingly in discussions such as ‘who founded Troy?’, the meaning of socialism, and the role of the doctor in society. The spirit of enquiry is ever present.

  Dostoevsky was passionately interested in the functioning of Russia’s legal system, and he was the first author to exploit to the full the dramatic potential of the police inquiry, the detailed interrogation of the suspect, and the procedure of the actual trial itself, laying the foundations for what is now widely enjoyed and popularly known as courtroom drama. He does not attempt to disguise his complete and utter lack of confidence in the workings of the recently reformed judicial system (see explanatory note to p. 723). The author, of course, does not speak in his own name; there is the anonymous, shadowy figure of the narrator, who every now and again, somewhat disconcertingly, addresses the reader in the first person; but since the narrator is positive, wise, and just, it is reasonable to suppose that the author concurs with him. The narrator is particularly mistrustful of the adversarial system of justice, in which the object is not to establish the truth, but to score a point, to win the case whatever the means. The defence counsel who acts for the innocent Dmitry does not believe in his innocence, but, in order to secure his acquittal, he is prepared to commit the worst form of verbal mugging, prepared deliberately to misquote the Scriptures, prepared to see ‘truth perverted’, prepared to act as the perfect example of a ‘hired conscience’. Ironically, had his casuistry succeeded, justice would have been done; in the event, he fails, and an innocent man is convicted. True, the prosecutor expresses his desire to discover the truth per se, and to that end he is willing ‘to defend’ the accused, but then since his brief is to secure a guilty verdict, his words in this respect are verging at best on meaningless rhetoric, at worst on hypocrisy. One look at the rest of the judicial mechanism, as represented by the jury—an ignorant bunch of peasants—and the probability of the defendant receiving a fair trial becomes vanishingly small. Neither does the public escape the severest censure for its readiness to view the whole clinical exposure of a man’s most intimate details as pure spectacle. It stands condemned for its supreme smugness, for the air of approving good humour with which it is unthinkingly prepared to perpetuate the view of the innate shrewdness of the Russian peasantry. ‘Our lads have outsmarted the sophisticated lawyer from the capital! Who would have thought it! Jolly well done! “Trust the peasants!”’ (never mind the fact that in the process they had just convicted an innocent man!). These are the comments heard among the anonymous, and amorphous, members of the public after the trial. Some fifteen years after Dostoevsky’s death Pobedonostsev wrote: ‘In Russia there is a motley crew of jurors drawn either in a haphazard way or artificially selected from the masses, who have neither an understanding of the duties of a judge, nor the ability to survey masses of facts requiring analysis and logical discrimination. Is there any wonder that, in such an environment, the jurors blindly follow one or the other counsel who has succeeded in making the strongest impression?’27

  The Karamazov Brothers is the Rome to which all the roads lead that he trod as a writer. It is the book in which ‘… Dostoevsky gathered together all the thought, the doubt, and the faith of a lifetime, into one timeless survey of life itself.’28 It incorporates themes and ideas that go back to his earliest years as an author. In his second novel The Double (1846), he had dealt with the subject of the split personality (the hero’s alter ego distorted as in a fairground mirror), treating the phenomenon as a psychological, indeed clinical, reality. ‘As far as I am concerned the story was a complete failure, but the idea behind it was quite sound, and the most significant one I ever tackled in the whole of my literary career,’ he wrote in 1877, a year before he began The Karamazov Brothers. One is tempted to speculate whether the original impetus might not have come from the German Romantics: from Chamisso’s Peter Schlemihl. Schlemihl loses his shadow, Faust, in the legend, his soul. Both are still operating in the religious, Christian domain, though Chamisso is already tending towards a psychological perception. The shadow that Chamisso’s devil rolls up neatly and pockets triumphantly, leaving the hero deprived and vulnerable, is no mere soul whose perdition will make existence unbearable in the eternal future, he is deprived of something more immediate which will make his existence in the present a living hell. Ivan Fyodorovich Karamazov’s dilemma, by contrast, is precisely the reverse; he is tormented not by the absence, but by the highly unwelcome presence of another identity within himself; with him the quantum leap from a religious to a psychological, clinical discernment, is complete.

  The second critically important work after The Double in the genesis of The Karamazov Brothers is The Village of Stepanchikovo. The incongruous Colonel Rostanev (a holy fool if ever there was one) is the direct progenitor of The Idiot, and anticipates Alyosha. Yezhevikin, Vidoplyasov, and Foma Fomich Opiskin from The Village all reappear in The Karamazov Brothers, to a greater or lesser degree recognizable as Snegiryov, Smerdyakov, and Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov respectively. Gogolian in spirit, Dickensian in structure, Molièrean in concept, this is the work in which the latent dramatist in Dostoevsky first asserts itself. The predominance of dialogue, deftly controlled confrontational skandal scenes, dramatically effective entries and exits with which Dostoevsky enlivens The Village reach their full potential in The Karamazov Brothers. Dostoevsky’s last novel is rooted firmly in the spoken word. Dostoevsky’s is an infinitely subtle and expressive use of language which is essentially dramatic. Dialogue is real speech, with all its hesitations, self-corrections, repetitions, emphases, gestures, and passional moments. Each character speaks vigorously in his or her own voice, not in any narrow, type-cast sense, but in a convincingly living way. Each of the Karamazov brothers has his own distinct style of expression, Dmitry and Ivan displaying contrasted emotional and intellectual eloquence. The sorrows of peasants pour out in unchecked flow, in the speech of S
taff Captain Snegiryov we hear the desperate accent of insulted self-esteem, in that of the sinister Smerdyakov the deft mimicry of his social superiors. The earthy, ebullient clown Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov puts on performances that take the art of discordance and vulgarity to preposterous extremes. All these characters speak loudly and insistently at the reader’s very ear. Even the narrative of this novel—the utterance, as we have seen, of a rather shadowy but still distinctly present narrator figure—is saturated, in its liberal measure of reported speech, with speech rhythms.

  Dostoevsky was always drawn by the idea of comprehensively encapsulating the spirit of the times, of making a definitive creative assessment of his epoch and, by his own admission, attempting it on no less ambitious a scale than Dante’s Divine Comedy.29 In a structural sense the world he presents is an intricate collage of conflicting views in different perspectives. It is above all a microcosm, devoid of any historical panorama. The location is a farcically obscure, monumentally insignificant ‘one-horse’ town rejoicing in the odd name of Skotoprigonyevsk (see explanatory note to p. 719). This ridiculously unlikely name, mentioned once only, is immediately followed, to heightened comic effect, by the narrator’s apology for being obliged to reveal it at all. There is a disconcerting momentary suggestion that everything is just a big joke, the author’s face dissolving in a clownish grin, and the materializing of the reader’s worst fears that he has just been strung along all the time. But this is a storyteller’s trick: to relax the grip, only to tighten it again abruptly a split second later.

  In its action The Karamazov Brothers is compacted beyond measure. The whole of the main action is squeezed into the space of four days (see the Time Chart on p. xxxvi). Event follows event in rapid succession, each chapter terminating in a cliff-hanger ending. To cover the simultaneous progression of different plotlines, real time is often suspended to allow the narrator to backtrack, producing a feverish and at first glance disordered succession of incidents. There is no slow and steady evolution; everything happens in rapid succession, hastening irresistibly and passionately to a conclusion. There is every justification for considering The Karamazov Brothers as being outside any time-frame, as being beyond the limitation of night and day, the mere incidentals of the rising or setting of the sun.

  As for glimpses of Dostoevsky the man himself, his state of spiritual and physical health, his mode of working, his personal proclivities as well as the events that moulded his character, there is the vivid testimony of his correspondence. In his novels and short fiction the themes of poverty, hardship, bereavement, imminent fear of death, epilepsy, gambling, and others are rooted in personal experience. Dostoevsky’s fiction in the eyes of the critic K. Mochulsky is an attempt to resolve the dilemma of his personal life in the form of a continuous confession. Significant though this confession is in terms of the profundity of the philosophical debate that it engenders, it is the qualities of Dostoevsky’s creative writing that have ensured its leading place in world literature.

  TRANSLATOR’S NOTE

  IT has been said that if a translation is faithful it cannot be elegant, and that if it is elegant it cannot be faithful. And George Steiner reminds us of a point that should be obvious but tends to be forgotten in often heated debate about translation: ‘There can be no exhaustive transfer from language A to language B’, ‘no meshing of nets so precise’ that every aspect of sense and association can survive the transfer. In this translation I have taken style as the all-important element by which an author is known to his readers, and I have spared no effort to be as faithful as possible to Dostoevsky’s style.

  The word ‘elegant’ certainly is not applicable to Dostoevsky’s style. He breaks every rule of grammar, syntax, and punctuation; his vocabulary is full of unusual words, to which he even adds one that he introduced into the language, stushevatsya (gently to drop out of existence); in short he stretches his own language to its uttermost limits, exploiting its potential to the full, like a good floor gymnast leaving no corner of the floorspace unused. He can throw in here and there an apparently innocuous word which will baffle experts and make native speakers scratch their heads in puzzlement when pressed for a precise meaning. An instance of this is the word Lyagavy (applied as a nickname), which may be interpreted in either an equine or a canine context. I have opted for the canine interpretation—Lurcher (see Bk.8, Ch.2). Other translators, including David Magarshack, have opted for an equine interpretation—a horse that kicks.

  In trying to follow Dostoevsky’s linguistic twists and turns, the translator constantly has to guard against being wrongfooted, being mesmerized by the original, and in the process violating the norms of his target language. It would hardly be helpful to the non-Russian-speaking reader to try to illustrate my point with one of his marathon sentences. One need go no further than the title, the standard English rendering of which is The Brothers Karamazov. This follows the original word order, the only one possible in Russian in this context. Had past translators been expressing themselves freely in natural English, without being hamstrung by that original Russian word order, they would no more have dreamt of saying The Brothers Karamazov than they would The Brothers Warner or The Brothers Marx.

  TEXTS USED

  Collected Works of Dostoevsky in 30 volumes (‘Nauka’, Leningrad, 1976). Polnoye sobraniye sochineniy v tridtsati tomakh Abbreviation CW.

  Polnoye sobraniye sochineniy, 6 (Tipografiya A. S. Suvorina, St Petersburg, 1885–6).

  Polnoye sobraniye sochineniy, 12/1–2 (A. F. Marks, St Petersburg, 1895), a free supplement to the magazine Niva for 1895.

  SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Anderson, Roger B., Dostoevsky: Myths of Duality (Gainesville, Fla., 1986).

  Fanger, Donald, Dostoevsky and Romantic Realism (Chicago and London, 1967).

  Gibson, Boyce A., The Religion of Dostoevsky (London, 1973).

  Gide, André, Dostoevsky (1923; repr. Penguin books, in association with Seeker & Warburg, 1949).

  Jones, John, Dostoevsky (Oxford, 1985).

  Jones, Malcolm, Dostoyevsky: The Novel of Discord (London, 1976).

  Leatherbarrow, W. J., The Brothers Karamazov (Cambridge, 1992).

  Linnér, Sven, Starets Zosima in the Brothers Karamazov (Stockholm, 1975).

  Merezhkovsky, Dmitry, Tolstoi as Man and Artist with an Essay on Dostoïevski (London, 1902).

  Mochulsky, K., Dostoevsky: His Life and Work, trans. Michael Minihan (Princeton, NJ, 1967).

  Muchnic, Helen, Dostoevsky’s English Reputation (Smith College Studies in Modern Languages, Northampton, Mass., 1939).

  Murry, John Middleton, Fyodor Dostoevsky (London, 1923).

  Peace, Richard, Dostoyevsky: An Examination of the Major Novels (Cambridge, 1971).

  Shestov, Lev, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy and Nietzsche, trans. Spencer Roberts (Athens, Oh., 1969).

  Thompson, Diane Oenning, The Brothers Karamazov and the Poetics of Memory (Cambridge, 1991).

  Zweig, Stefan, Three Masters: Balzac, Dickens, Dostoeffsky, trans. Eden and Cedar Paul (London, 1930).

  CHRONOLOGY OF FYODOR DOSTOEVSKY

  Italicized items are works by Dostoevsky listed by year of first publication. Dates are Old Style, which means that they lag behind those used in nineteenth-century Western Europe by twelve days.

  1821

  Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky is born in Moscow, the son of an army doctor (30 October).

  1837

  His mother dies.

  1838

  Enters the Engineering Academy in St Petersburg as an army cadet.

  1839

  His father dies, probably murdered by his serfs.

  1842

  Is promoted to Second Lieutenant.

  1843

  Translates Balzac’s Eugénie Grandet.

  1844

  Resigns his army commission.

  1846

  Poor Folk

  The Double

  1849

  Netochka Nezvanova

  Is led out for e
xecution in the Semenovsky Square in St Petersburg (22 December); his sentence is commuted at the last moment to penal servitude, to be followed by army service and exile, in Siberia; he is deprived of his army commission.

  1850–4

  Serves four years at the prison at Omsk in western Siberia.

  1854

  Is released from prison (March), but is immediately posted as a private soldier to an infantry battalion stationed at Semipalatinsk, in western Siberia.

  1855

  Is promoted to Corporal.

  Death of Nicholas I; accession of Alexander II.

  1856

  Is promoted to Ensign.

  1857

  Marries Maria Dmitrievna Isaeva (6 February).

  1859

  Resigns his army commission with the rank of Second Lieutenant (March), and receives permission to return to

  European Russia.

  Resides in Tver (August–December).

  Moves to St Petersburg (December).

  Uncle’s Dream

  The Village of Stepanchikovo

  1861

  Begins publication of a new literary monthly, Vremia, founded by himself and his brother Mikhail (January).

  The Emancipation of the Serfs.