Fyodor Dostoevsky - The Karamazov Brothers

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Ignat Avsey 1994

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First published as a Worlds Classics paperback 1994
Reissued as an Oxford Worlds Classics paperback 1998

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ISBN13: 9780192835093

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OXFORD WORLDS CLASSICS

FYODOR DOSTOEVSKY

Translated with an Introduction and Notes by
IGNAT AVSEY

OXFORD WORLDS 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 (18612). 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 gamblingan 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 Dostoevskys The Village of Stepanchikovo (1983) and Insulted and Injured (2007).

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 Irne

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 readers 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