The Brothers Karamazov: Translated by Richard Pevear & Larissa Volokhonsky

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In Dostoevsky there were things believable and not to be believed, but some so true they changed you as you read them; frailty and madness, wickedness and saintliness, and the insanity of gambling were there to know as you knew the landscape and the roads in Turgenev, and the movement of troops, the terrain and the officers and the men and the fighting in Tolstoy. I have just arrived and have come to thank you for that pound of nuts, for no one else ever bought me a pound of nuts; you are the only one that ever did. There, he is visited by the Grand Inquisitor himself, who announces that the Christian savior will be burned at the stake the next day. I have always been grateful to him for the tact he showed in refraining from reviewing any of my novels. She hired a secretary, who read the Russian text to her aloud; Garnett would dictate back in English, sometimes grabbing away the original text and holding it a few inches from her ailing eyes.

Wilson did not hesitate to tell Nabokov that he did not like “Bend Sinister,” “Lolita,” “Ada,” and other major works. In particular, Richard Pevear emphasized the joke/pun of the doctor saying “Be pre-pared for any-thing” which was immediately followed by the doctor himself “prepared to step across the threshold to the carriage.When it came to Russian literature, the correspondence between Nabokov and Wilson was rather like that between an amused, patient teacher and an eager, overreaching student. Alas, Dostoevsky — all of whose major characters clearly embody aspects of his own extremist personality — died in 1881, shortly after completing this summa of his most deeply felt themes and obsessions. She would finish a page, and throw it off on a pile on the floor without looking up, and start a new page.

In art as in science there is no delight without the detail, and it is on details that I have tried to fix the reader’s attention.As a conservative Russophile Christian, Dostoevsky hoped his novel would be a theodicy, a justification of the ways of God to man, but as an artist he gives equal weight to the atheistic and empiricist worldview. While I certainly enjoyed rereading “ The Brothers Karamazov” in this well-designed Liveright edition, I suspect that almost any modern translation will convey the deeply felt humanity, as well as the majesty, of Dostoevsky’s final masterpiece. Or they never get that far: until the King James commission, English translators of the Bible were sometimes burned at the stake or strangled—or, as in the case of William York Tyndale, both.

The galling thing is, most of the people nudging the editor to soften his criticism don’t actually know or care much about the merits of the work in question. The majority of pages are undamaged with some creasing or tearing, and pencil underlining of text, but this is minimal. Those three are from the page preceding the famous “Rebellion” chapter, if you would like to check the context. Wilson who is not aware that there exists an analogous construction in Russian, prislushivat’sya k zvuku, “to listen close to the sound”—which, of course, makes nonsense of the exclusive Russianism imagined by him, and secondly, She turned down an offer from Tolstoy’s close friends Louise and Aylmer Maude to collaborate on a translation of “War and Peace” and did it on her own.But then came the pandemic: the students had been sent home, the library was closed (books could still be fetched for faculty, but there was no browsing or schmoozing). Nabokov, despite his debts to Wilson, treated him, especially on Russian matters, with a breezy condescension: “Dear Bunny, I am going to steal an hour from Gogol and thrash out this matter of Russian versification, because you are as wrong as can be.