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Fyodor Dostoevsky’s masterpiece The Brothers Karamazov (1880) grows organically from its epigraph from the Gospel of John: a seed must fall to the ground and die to bring forth life. The novel tells of four brothers who share the seed of a sinful and neglectful father. The father’s murder by one of them – or, as the reader comes to understand, by all of them – constitutes the novel’s central mystery. “Who doesn’t desire one’s father’s death?” shrieks the intellectual Ivan, crazed by his realization of his own guilt, contrary to logic and evidence, at the culminating moment of his brother Dmitry’s trial. The saintly younger brother Alyosha is also guilty, having violated his elder’s command to be with his brothers on the night of the murder. Based on all material evidence Dmitry, the eldest, must be guilty – yet he is innocent. And the actual murderer – the illegitimate son Smerdyakov – takes his own life, leaving open the question of anyone’s innocence and guilt.
Dostoevsky builds his theodicy from inserted texts by two of the brothers. Ivan’s “Grand Inquisitor” describes an encounter between the risen Christ and the Roman Catholic authorities who have appropriated his message to build their secular kingdom on Earth. Ivan tells his “poem” to Alyosha in a tavern where they get reacquainted after many years apart. As Ivan has argued in the preceding chapter, “Rebellion”, he cannot accept a world in which God allows children to suffer. The question reverberates through the novel, which teems with abused children – the brothers themselves, a bullied schoolboy, a homeless peasant baby, citizens in an unjust political system and humanity abandoned by its God.
Finding that he cannot refute Ivan’s argument through logic, Alyosha counters it with the religious and ethical vision of his own text, “The Russian Monk”, featuring the hagiographic life story and teachings of his spiritual father, the elder Zosima. Lacking the lurid power of Ivan’s devastating argumentation, Alyosha’s text deploys evocative language, references to biblical texts and parables, and examples from Zosima’s life, to lead the reader out of the demonic cycle of rationality and into the realm of faith and grace.
The Brothers Karamazov has previously been translated into English at least seven times. Any new version can be expected to draw on its predecessors’ examples and advance beyond them in accuracy and style. Constance Garnett’s pioneering translation (1912) has been meticulously edited and corrected at least three times, including by the scholars Ralph Matlaw (1976) and Susan McReynolds Oddo (2011) in authoritative Norton Critical editions. Michael R. Katz’s new translation benefits from the most recent edition, and his afterword draws on critical materials appended there. Katz’s reader should take note that the action takes place in the late 1860s, not the 1870s.
In his introduction Katz takes up a position between that of Garnett and another prominent predecessor, the team Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, whose groundbreaking literal version came out in 1990. Katz claims to improve on what he characterizes as Garnett’s “Victorian English” and “less than perfect” Russian; as for Pevear and Volokhonsky, he has endeavoured to overcome their “word-for-word and syntax-for-syntax style that sacrifices tone and frequently misconstrues a passage’s overall sense”. He also aims to do justice to Dostoevsky’s humour and to the individual speech patterns of distinct characters, as well as to the idiosyncrasies of the novel’s narrative style.
On grounds of accuracy the translation holds up. But readability varies widely. Some chapters, for example those featuring dialogue with women, avoid bumpy literalisms. The difficulties begin when Dostoevsky moves beyond straightforward conversation or argumentation. In “The Grand Inquisitor” Katz defaults to a safe literalism, conveying the logic of Ivan’s treatise, but not its rhetoric, which resembles that of the medieval mystery play. In “The Russian Monk” the propensity for literal renderings reduces the text to the level of exposition, draining it of its lyrical, biblical and ecclesiastical coloration and undermining its intended role of countering Ivan’s world-view through richly layered poetic language. Here a comparison with Katz’s predecessors, especially the virtuosic Garnett, can be instructive.
The novel chronicles a plot of demonic temptation; the devil rises up from the Russian soil through Smerdyakov and invades Russia from the West through Ivan. The “devil” wording throughout the book reinforces this story, which culminates in the act of patricide and in Ivan’s vision of the devil and his breakdown at Dmitry’s trial. Oddo’s revision duly restored all mentions of the devil into the text, which Garnett had diluted with more fluent English idioms. Katz retains this practice. Elsewhere, though, in rendering the novel’s central “accursed question” of guilt or innocence, he opts for readability, varying the translation of the important word “guilty” (vinovat). Zosima tells of his dying brother’s joyful acceptance of guilt (“everyone is guilty before everyone else”), while also asking the rhetorical question “How can I possibly be responsible [vinovat] for all?” Similarly, the translator occasionally passes up on opportunities to offer “miracle” for chudo, as in the preliminary investigation, where Katz’s Dmitry instead calls his father’s murder a “marvel”. This, too, distracts from Alyosha’s vision of irrational faith in response to Ivan’s demonic rationality, skewing the novel’s delicate balance of world-views.
When compared with its rivals, in challenging moments this translation tends to a literalism that at times exceeds even Pevear and Volokhonsky’s. Certain phrases in Russian do not have to be reproduced in English (“some kind of”; “the fact that”), even if Dostoevsky uses them more than other authors. Retaining them and other structural features of Russian introduces an awkwardness absent in the original: “some sort of shabby hunting jacket” or “some sort of unexpected, almost frenzied voice”. Conversely, the decision to use contractions instead of “not” or “have” expressions (“can’t”; “would’ve”) inserts a casual, conversational tone in contexts that are elevated or formal.
Michael R. Katz’s translation is welcome if it brings new readers to The Brothers Karamazov, but its levelling of the complexity of Dostoevsky’s style, its tendency to literalism and its unevenness of tone fall short of the very high standard set by the Norton editions of Constance Garnett.
Carol Apollonio is Honorary President of the International Dostoevsky Society and has published many studies of Russian literature, including Dostoevsky’s Secrets and The New Russian Dostoevsky. She teaches at Duke University
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