A Note on the Translation

This is a complete translation of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Brat’ya Karamazovy, made directly from the Russian, from the public-domain text in modern orthography published by Russian Wikisource. Constance Garnett’s translation of 1912 was consulted only to check the meaning where the Russian is in doubt, and only as far as the fourth chapter of Book Twelve; none of her wording is reused.

The novel has four parts, twelve books, and an epilogue. Each of the 5,063 paragraphs of the Russian appears here as one paragraph. Every “it seems,” “perhaps,” and “they say” of the narrator, a chronicler of “our town,” is kept.

Russians call one person by several names, and the choice is the relationship of the moment: the youngest brother is Alexei Fyodorovich, Alyosha, Alyoshka, Alyoshenka; Dmitri is also Mitya, Mitenka, and Mitka. The English uses the form the Russian uses in each place, in narration as in dialogue, and never turns a diminutive into a full name or an English pet name. Women’s surnames keep their feminine form (Mrs. Khokhlakova, Miss Svetlova). The list of names that follows shows each person’s forms.

English has one “you” for the Russian ty (to intimates, children, and inferiors) and vy (to everyone else). No “thou” is used, even in the Gospel verses, which are rendered afresh from the Russian. Where a character changes pronoun, the English of that sentence carries the change: a first name or diminutive in place of a patronymic, a “sir” dropped or added, a colder or warmer turn. The servile little -s of Smerdyakov and Staff Captain Snegiryov is “sir.”

Rubles, versts, and ranks stay Russian; nadryv, the title of Book Four, is “strain” throughout. Foreign phrases stay in italics, glossed in parentheses where the sense matters. Spelling is American; the original’s slips of date and quotation are kept. The fourteen short translator’s notes, at the ends of their chapters, explain only a pun that dies in English or a person or book the text leans on, and offer no commentary.