Book Description
Translated with an Introduction by David McDuff.

FROM OUR EDITORS

This turbulent story centers on the murder of Fyodor Pavlovitch Karamazov, a corrupt, loutish landowner, and the aftermath for his sons: the passionate Dmitri, the coldly intellectual Ivan, the spiritual Alexey, and the bastard Smerdyakov.

ANNOTATION

The story of the Karamazov brothers and their varying justifications, or lack thereof, for the world.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

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 disastrous consequences of rationalism. The novel is also richly comic: the Russian Orthodox Church, the legal system, and even the author's most cherished 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 Dostoevsky's genius, particularly in the use of the spoken word, which ranges over every mode of human expression.

FROM THE CRITICS

USA Today

No reader who knows The Brothers Karamazov should ignore this magnificent translation. And no reader who doesn't should wait any longer to acquaint himself with one of the peaks of modern fiction.

New York Review of Books

It may well be that Dostoevsky's [world], with all its resourceful energies of life and language, it only now—and through the medium of [this] new translation—beginning to come home to the English-speaking reader.

John Bayley - The New York Review of Books

. . . Dostoevsky's [world], with . . . its resourceful energies of life and language, is . . . beginning to come home to the English-speaking reader.

Joseph Frank - Princeton University

Does justice to all [the novel's] levels of artistry and intention . . . come[s] as close to Dostoevsky's Russian as is possible.

USA Today