Madness you may call it, but therein may be the secret of his genius…. I prefer the word exaltation, exaltation which can merge into madness, perhaps. In fact all great men have had that vein in them; it was the source of their greatness; the reasonable man achieves nothing.
Not all reception to the book was positive. Some were critical of it, such as Henry James, Vladimir Nabokov, D. H. Lawrence, and Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky. Tchaikovsky, for instance, once said of the novel in a letter that «Dostoyevsky is a writer of genius, but an antipathetic one.»
As for Leo Tolstoy himself, the work appears to have proved both challenging and provocative. Entries from his journal indicate that, like others, he considered Dostoevsky’s idiosyncratic style to be an obstacle, yet the book was one of several that he requested accompany him on his deathbed.
The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein is said to have read The Brothers Karamazov «so often he knew whole passages of it by heart». A copy of the novel was one of the few possessions Wittgenstein brought with him to the front during World War I.
Martin Heidegger identified Dostoevsky’s thought as one of the most important sources for his early and best known book, Being and Time. Of the two portraits Heidegger kept on the wall of his office, one was of Dostoevsky.
According to philosopher Charles B. Guignon, the novel’s most fascinating character, Ivan Karamazov, had by the middle of the twentieth century become the icon of existentialist rebellion in the writings of existentialist philosophers Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre. Camus centered on a discussion of Ivan Karamazov’s revolt in his 1951 book Rebel. Ivan’s poem «The Grand Inquisitor» is arguably one of the best-known passages in modern literature due to its ideas about human nature, freedom, power, authority, and religion, as well as for its fundamental ambiguity. A reference to the poem can be found in English novelist Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World Revisited and American writer David Foster Wallace’s novel Infinite Jest.
Nobel Prize laureate William Faulkner reread the book regularly, claiming it as his greatest literary inspiration next to Shakespeare’s works and the Bible. He once wrote that American literature had yet to produce anything great enough to compare with Dostoyevsky’s novel.
In an essay on The Brothers Karamazov, written after the Russian Revolution and the First World War, Nobel Prize-winning author Hermann Hesse described Dostoevsky as not a «poet» but a «prophet». British writer W. Somerset Maugham included the book in his list of ten greatest novels in the world.
Contemporary Turkish Nobel Prize-winning writer Orhan Pamuk said during a lecture in St. Petersburg that the first time he read The Brothers Karamazov, his life was changed. He felt Dostoyevsky, through his storytelling, revealed completely unique insight into life and human nature.
American philosophical novelist Walker Percy said in an interview:
I suppose my model is nearly always Dostoevsky, who was a man of very strong convictions, but his characters illustrated and incarnated the most powerful themes and issues and trends of his day. I think maybe the greatest novel of all time is The Brothers Karamazov which…almost prophesies and prefigures everything—all the bloody mess and the issues of the 20th century.
Pope Benedict XVI cited the book in the 2007 encyclical Spe Salvi.
Soviet leader Joseph Stalin had read Dostoevsky since his youth and considered the author as a great psychologist. His copy of The Brothers Karamazov reveals extensive highlights and notes in the margins that he made while reading the work, which have been studied and analyzed by multiple researchers.
According to Serbian state news agency Tanjug, Serbian president Aleksandar Vučić described Dostoevsky as his best-loved novelist, saying: «The Brothers Karamazov may be the best work of world literature.» American First Lady Laura Bush has said she is an admirer of the novel.
Translations
Although The Brothers Karamazov has been translated from the original Russian into a number of languages, the novel’s diverse array of distinct voices and literary techniques makes its translation difficult. Constance Garnett published a translation in 1912, which Garth Terry called «the first adequate English translation». An earlier version (by Isabel Florence Hapgood) was published in 1905.
In 1958, David Magarshack and Manuel Komroff released translations of the novel, published respectively by Penguin and The New American Library of World Literature. In 1976, Ralph Matlaw thoroughly revised Garnett’s work for his Norton Critical Edition volume. This in turn was the basis for Victor Terras’ influential A Karamazov Companion. Another translation is by Julius Katzer, published by Progress Publishers in 1981 and later re-printed by Raduga Publishers Moscow.
In 1990 Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky released a new translation; it won a PEN/Book-of-the-Month Club Translation Prize in 1991 and garnered positive reviews from The New York Times Book Review and the Dostoevsky scholar Joseph Frank, who praised it for being the most faithful to Dostoevsky’s original Russian.
Peter France
In The Oxford Guide to Literature in English Translations, academic Peter France comments on several translations of Dostoevsky’s work. In regard to Constance Garnett’s translations, he writes:
Her translations read easily…the basic meaning of the Russian text is accurately rendered on the whole. It is true, as critics such as Nikoliukin have demonstrated, that she shortens and simplifies, muting Dostoevsky’s jarring contrasts, sacrificing his insistent rhythms and repetitions, toning down the Russian colouring, explaining and normalizing in all kinds of ways…Garnett shortens some of Dostoevsky’s idiosyncrasy in order to produce an acceptable English text, but her versions were in many cases pioneering versions; decorous they may be, but they allowed this strange new voice to invade English literature and thus made it possible for later translators to go further in the search for more authentic voice.
On David Magarshack’s Dostoevsky translations, France says:
It is not certain that Magarshack has worn as well as Garnett. He certainly corrects some of her errors; he also aims for a more up-to-date style which flows more easily in English…Being even more thoroughly englished than Garnett’s, Magarshack’s translations lack some of the excitement of the foreign.
On Andrew R. MacAndrew’s American version, he comments: «He translates fairly freely, altering details, rearranging, shortening and explaining the Russian to produce texts which lack a distinctive voice.»
On David McDuff’s Penguin translation:
McDuff carries this literalism the furthest of any of the translators. In his Brothers Karamazov the odd, fussy tone of the narrator is well rendered in the preface…At times, indeed, the convoluted style might make the reader unfamiliar with Dostoevsky’s Russian question the translator’s command of English. More seriously, this literalism means that the dialogue is sometimes impossibly odd—and as a result rather dead…Such ‘foreignizing’ fidelity makes for difficult reading.
On the Pevear and Volokhonsky’s translation, France writes:
Pevear and Volokhonsky, while they too stress the need to exhume the real, rough-edged Dostoevsky from the normalization practised by earlier translators, generally offer a rather more satisfactory compromise between the literal and the readable. In particular, their rendering of dialogue is often livelier and more colloquial than McDuff’s…Elsewhere, it has to be said, the desire to replicate the vocabulary or syntax of the Russian results in unnecessary awkwardness and obscurity.
In commenting on Ignat Avsey’s translation, he writes: «His not entirely unprecedented choice of a more natural-sounding English formulation is symptomatic of his general desire to make his text English…His is an enjoyable version in the domesticating tradition.»
List of English translations
This is a list of unabridged English translations of the novel:
Constance Garnett (1912) revised by Avrahm Yarmolinsky (1933) revised by Alexandra Kropotkin and abridged by W. Somerset Maugham (1949) revised by Manuel Komroff (1958) revised by Ralph E. Matlaw (1976) revised by Ralph E. Matlaw and Susan McReynolds Oddo (2011) David Magarshack (1958) Andrew R. MacAndrew (1970) Julius Katzer (1980, as The Karamazov Brothers) Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (1990) David McDuff (1993) Ignat Avsey (1994, as The Karamazov Brothers) Michael R. Katz (2023) David Gildea (2024)
