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Contents

Cover

About the Book

About the Author

Also by Fyodor Dostoevsky

Dedication

Title Page

Introduction, by Richard Pevear

List of Characters

From the Author

PART I

Book One: A Nice Little Family

1. Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov

2. The First Son Sent Packing

3. Second Marriage, Second Children

4. The Third Son, Alyosha

5. Elders

Book Two: An Inappropriate Gathering

1. They Arrive at the Monastery

2. The Old Buffoon

3. Women of Faith

4. A Lady of Little Faith

5. So Be It! So Be It!

6. Why Is Such a Man Alive!

7. A Seminarist-Careerist

8. Scandal

Book Three: Sensualists

1. In the Servants’ Quarters

2. Stinking Lizaveta

3. The Confession of an Ardent Heart. In Verse

4. The Confession of an Ardent Heart. In Anecdotes

5. The Confession of an Ardent Heart. “Heels Up”

6. Smerdyakov

7. Disputation

8. Over the Cognac

9. The Sensualists

10. The Two Together

11. One More Ruined Reputation

PART II

Book Four: Strains

1. Father Ferapont

2. At His Father’s

3. He Gets Involved with Schoolboys

4. At the Khokhlakovs’

5. Strain in the Drawing Room

6. Strain in the Cottage

7. And in the Fresh Air

Book Five: Pro and Contra

1. A Betrothal

2. Smerdyakov with a Guitar

3. The Brothers Get Acquainted

4. Rebellion

5. The Grand Inquisitor

6. A Rather Obscure One for the Moment

7. “It’s Always Interesting to Talk with an Intelligent Man”

Book Six: The Russian Monk

1. The Elder Zosima and His Visitors

2. From the Life of the Hieromonk and Elder Zosima, Departed in God, Composed from His Own Words by Alexei Fyodorovich Karamazov. Biographical Information

(a) Of the Elder Zosima’s Young Brother

(b) Of Holy Scripture in the Life of Father Zosima

(c) Recollections of the Adolescence and Youth of the Elder Zosima While Still in the World. The Duel

(d) The Mysterious Visitor

3. From Talks and Homilies of the Elder Zosima

(e) Some Words about the Russian Monk and His Possible Significance

(f) Some Words about Masters and Servants and Whether It Is Possible for Them to Become Brothers in Spirit

(g) Of Prayer, Love, and the Touching of Other Worlds

(h) Can One Be the Judge of One’s Fellow Creatures? Of Faith to the End

(i) Of Hell and Hell Fire: A Mystical Discourse

PART III

Book Seven: Alyosha

1. The Odor of Corruption

2. An Opportune Moment

3. An Onion

4. Cana of Galilee

Book Eight: Mitya

1. Kuzma Samsonov

2. Lyagavy

3. Gold Mines

4. In the Dark

5. A Sudden Decision

6. Here I Come!

7. The Former and Indisputable One

8. Delirium

Book Nine: The Preliminary Investigation

1. The Start of the Official Perkhotin’s Career

2. The Alarm

3. The Soul’s Journey through Torments. The First Torment

4. The Second Torment

5. The Third Torment

6. The Prosecutor Catches Mitya

7. Mitya’s Great Secret. Met with Hisses

8. The Evidence of the Witnesses. The Wee One

9. Mitya Is Taken Away

PART IV

Book Ten: Boys

1. Kolya Krasotkin

2. Kids

3. A Schoolboy

4. Zhuchka

5. At Ilyusha’s Bedside

6. Precocity

7. Ilyusha

Book Eleven: Brother Ivan Fyodorovich

1. At Grushenka’s

2. An Ailing Little Foot

3. A Little Demon

4. A Hymn and a Secret

5. Not You! Not You!

6. The First Meeting with Smerdyakov

7. The Second Visit to Smerdyakov

8. The Third and Last Meeting with Smerdyakov

9. The Devil. Ivan Fyodorovich’s Nightmare

10. “He Said That!”

Book Twelve: A Judicial Error

1. The Fatal Day

2. Dangerous Witnesses

3. Medical Expertise and One Pound of Nuts

4. Fortune Smiles on Mitya

5. A Sudden Catastrophe

6. The Prosecutor’s Speech. Characterizations

7. A Historical Survey

8. A Treatise on Smerdyakov

9. Psychology at Full Steam. The Galloping Troika. The Finale of the Prosecutor’s Speech

10. The Defense Attorney’s Speech. A Stick with Two Ends

11. There Was No Money. There Was No Robbery

12. And There Was No Murder Either

13. An Adulterer of Thought

14. Our Peasants Stood Up for Themselves

Epilogue

1. Plans to Save Mitya

2. For a Moment the Lie Became Truth

3. llyushechka’s Funeral. The Speech at the Stone

Notes

Copyright

About the Book

The Brothers Karamazov is a murder mystery, a courtroom drama, and an exploration of erotic rivalry in a series of triangular love affairs involving Karamazov and his three sons – the impulsive and sensual Dmitri; the coldly rational Ivan; and the healthy young novice Alyosha. Through the gripping events of their story, Dostoevsky portrays the social and spiritual strivings in what was both a golden age and a tragic turning point in Russian culture.

About the Author

Fyodor Dostoevsky was born in Moscow on 11th November 1821. He had six siblings and his mother died in 1837 and his father in 1839. He graduated from the St Petersburg Academy of Military Engineering in 1846 but decided to change careers and become a writer. His first book, Poor Folk, did very well but on 23rd April 1849 he was arrested for subversion and sentenced to death. After a mock-execution his sentence was commuted to hard labour in Siberia where he developed epilepsy. He was released in 1854. His 1860 book, The House of the Dead was based on these experiences. In 1857 he married Maria Dmitrievna Isaeva. After his release he adopted more conservative and traditional values and rejected his previous socialist position. In the following years he spent a lot of time abroad, struggled with an addiction to gambling and fell deeply in debt. His wife died in 1864 and he married Anna Grigoryeva Snitkina. In the following years he published his most enduring and successful books, including Crime and Punishment (1865). He died on 9th February 1881.

ALSO BY FYODOR DOSTOEVSKY

Crime and Punishment

Demons

Notes from Underground

The Gambler

The Idiot

The Devils

A Writer’s Diary (2 Vols)

Dedicated to Anna Grigorievna Dostoevsky1

Verily, verily, I say unto you, Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit.

John 12:24

The Brothers Karamazov

A Novel in Four Parts with Epilogue

Fyodor Dostoevsky

Translated, Introduced and Annotated By
Richard Pevear and
Larissa Volokhonsky

Introduction

The Brothers Karamazov is a joyful book. Readers who know what it is “about” may find this an intolerably whimsical statement. It does have moments of joy, but they are only moments; the rest is greed, lust, squalor, unredeemed suffering, and a sometimes terrifying darkness. But the book is joyful in another sense: in its energy and curiosity, in its formal inventiveness, in the mastery of its writing. And therefore, finally, in its vision.

This paradox is not peculiar to The Brothers Karamazov. What is peculiar to Dostoevsky is the intensifying of the contrast. The manner of The Brothers Karamazov, as opposed to its matter, is essentially comic, and its humor erupts at the most unexpected moments. It is a comedy of style which, again paradoxically, in no way detracts from the realism “in the highest sense” that Dostoevsky claimed as the principle of his art. The seriousness of art is not the same as the seriousness of philosophy, or the seriousness of injustice. The difference, which Dostoevsky understood very well, has sometimes escaped his commentators.

Perhaps from a similar mistaking of Dostoevsky’s intentions, previous translators of The Brothers Karamazov into English have revised, “corrected,” or smoothed over his idiosyncratic prose, removing much of the humor and distinctive voicing of the novel. We have made this new translation in the belief that a truer rendering of Dostoevsky’s style would restore missing dimensions to the book.

The juxtaposing of extremes that one finds in The Brothers Karamazov was also a mark of Dostoevsky’s life. The three years he spent working on the novel, which was completed in 1880, were comparatively the most settled he was to know. In 1871, at the age of fifty, he had returned to Russia after four years of “voluntary exile” abroad. His young wife, Anna Grigorievna, took over his practical affairs and in 1873 became his publisher, which for the first time brought him some financial stability. In 1876 Dostoevsky and his wife purchased the house they had been renting in the quiet provincial town of Staraya Russa, a setting that transferred itself to The Brothers Karamazov. Their domestic life was disrupted by one tragic event—the death of their three-year-old son, Alexei, in 1878—which also left its deep mark on the novel. But as an author and as a public figure, Dostoevsky was at the highest point of his career. Prominent friends introduced him at court; the emperor Alexander II asked him to be the spiritual guide of his younger sons, the Grand Dukes Sergei and Pavel; he made the acquaintance of the future Alexander III and presented him with copies of his works. He was a frequent guest at aristocratic salons in Petersburg. The Brothers Karamazov, which was appearing serially, was being read and discussed with great excitement. In Moscow, on June 8, 1880, he delivered an address on the poet Pushkin which brought him enormous public acclaim. His funeral eight months later, in the words of his biographer Mochulsky, “turned into an historical event—thirty thousand people accompanied his coffin, seventy-two delegations carried wreaths, fifteen choirs took part in the procession.”

Some three decades earlier, however, on April 23, 1849, Dostoevsky had been arrested along with other members of a secret utopian society and sentenced to death. The emperor Nikolai I, father of Alexander II, changed the sentence but ordered that the reprieve be announced only at the last minute. After eight months in the Petropavlovsky Fortress, the young writer was taken out to what he thought would be his execution. He described the event in a letter to his brother Mikhail:

Today, December 22, we were driven to Semyonovsky Parade Ground. There the death sentence was read to us all, we were given the cross to kiss, swords were broken over our heads, and our final toilet was arranged (white shirts). Then three of us were set against the posts so as to carry out the execution. We were summoned in threes; consequently I was in the second group, and there was not more than a minute left to live. I remembered you, my brother, and all yours; at the last minute you, you alone, were in my mind, and it was only then that I realized how much I love you, my dearest brother! I also succeeded in embracing Pleshcheyev and Durov, who were beside me, and bade farewell to them. Finally the retreat was sounded, those who had been tied to the posts were led back, and they read to us that His Imperial Majesty granted us our lives. Thereupon followed the actual sentence… .

Brother, I’m not depressed and haven’t lost spirit. Life everywhere is life, life is in ourselves and not in the external. There will be people near me, and to be a human being among human beings, and remain one forever, no matter what misfortunes befall, not to become depressed, and not to falter—this is what life is, herein lies its task. I have come to recognize this. This idea has entered into my flesh and blood. Yes, it’s true! That head which created, lived by the highest life of art, which acknowledged and had come to know the highest demands of the spirit, that head has been cut from my shoulders. Memory remains, and the images I have created and still not molded in flesh. They will leave their harsh mark on me, it is true! But my heart is left me, and the same flesh and blood which likewise can love and suffer and desire and remember, and this is, after all, life. On voit le soleil! Well, good-bye, brother! Do not grieve for me… . Never until now have such rich and healthy stores of spiritual life throbbed in me.

I have quoted at length from this extraordinary letter not only for its own sake but because certain qualities of its spirit, and even some of its words, were to reappear thirty years later in the speeches of Dmitri Karamazov. And because it expresses so clearly the “irrational” value of life and the purifying effect of suffering, central themes of Dostoevsky’s later work, which he knew first of all from experience.

The “actual sentence” he received was eight years of penal servitude, which the emperor reduced to four years followed by exile “into the ranks.” It was ten years before Dostoevsky was granted permission to return to Petersburg.

Conditions in the prison of Omsk, where he served the first part of his sentence, were much worse, as we know from his letters, than he described them in the fictionalized Notes from the Dead House (1860). These were years of terrible solitude for him, but also of self-judgment and the beginnings of a spiritual regeneration. On leaving prison, he wrote to N. D. Fonvizina, the wife of a political exile who had given him a copy of the Gospels:

Not because you are religious, but because I myself have experienced and felt it keenly, I will tell you that in such moments one thirsts like “parched grass” for faith and finds it precisely because truth shines in misfortune. I will tell you regarding myself that I am a child of the age, a child of nonbelief and doubt up till now and even (I know it) until my coffin closes. What terrible torments this thirst to believe has cost me and still costs me, becoming stronger in my soul, the more there is in me of contrary reasonings. And yet sometimes God sends me moments in which I am utterly at peace.

The coexistence of faith and unbelief indeed remained with Dostoevsky all his life; its final artistic expression appears in The Brothers Karamazov, in the opposed figures of the elder Zosima and the Grand Inquisitor.

Dostoevsky “met” the Christ of the Gospels in the prison of Omsk. He also met there a young man named Ilyinsky, who was serving a twenty-year sentence for parricide. He described him in Notes from the Dead House:

All the time that I lived with him, he was in the most excellent, in the most cheerful frame of mind. This was a flighty, light-headed individual, irresponsible in the highest degree, although by no means a fool. I never noticed any particular cruelty in him.

He did not believe Ilyinsky was guilty of the crime. Later he learned that the man had been cleared, after serving ten years of his sentence. The story of this “life … already ruined in the time of its youth, under such a terrible sentence,” eventually became the subject of The Brothers Karamazov, or, as the narrator of the novel says, “the external side of it.”

This brief account of two moments from Dostoevsky’s life may be enough to suggest that he knew the extremes of Russian society and its unresolved conflicts as no other writer could have known them. He knew them objectively, and he also knew them within himself. Far from resolving these conflicts in some higher synthesis, in his later work he expanded and deepened them, transforming them finally into a universal human drama.

The Brothers Karamazov is much more than the account of a murder, an investigation, and a trial; but it is primarily that, and the story is told with such perfect pacing and in such bold strokes that it absorbs almost all of the reader’s attention. Structurally this is the most symmetrical of Dostoevsky’s novels. Dmitri Karamazov stands “in the dark” at the exact center of it. He is the sensual man, impulsive and “poetic,” the child of his father’s first marriage. He has two half-brothers who are equally his opposites: the atheist intellectual Ivan, and the quiet novice Alyosha. The passions that lead to the murder involve Dmitri’s relations with two women; the victim of the murder is his father, Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov, the “wicked and sentimental” old profligate, who has passed on to all three of his sons the “earthy force of the Karamazovs,” his enigmatic vitality. And there is Smerdyakov, Fyodor Pavlovich’s lackey, who is rumored to be his illegitimate son. The conflicts within this “nice little family” are tightly wound in the first half of the novel, to be released with all their consequences in the second half. The idea stated by the elder Zosima, that “each of us is guilty before all and for all,” is fully embodied in the fates of the Karamazovs.

The circumstances, as simply as I have described them, are already charged with dramatic potential, which Dostoevsky enhances by his methods of composition. Narrative time is extremely condensed in the novel. The action takes place over a period of several months, but of those months only the events of a few days are actually described. Physical space is also restricted; most of the scenes take place in small or crowded rooms. What there is of natural description is largely symbolic—a dark crossroads, a pathless forest, flowers “falling asleep” in the hermitage garden at night. The greater part of the novel is made up of dialogue and monologue. Hence the large scale of Dostoevsky’s characters, their way of emerging from the book—so much so that commentators have often argued or agreed with them as if they were quite independent of their author. They are not representative social types or individuals but inwardly free persons. Dostoevsky seems intent on bringing together in one place as many contradictory people as possible. The “inappropriate gathering” of Book 2 and the trial of Book 12 are examples, but the novel as a whole is formed in the same way. Characters and ideas do not evolve or develop; they appear simultaneously, in a decisive moment.

The style of The Brothers Karamazov is based on the spoken, not the written, word. Dostoevsky composed in voices. We know from his notebooks and letters how he gathered the phrases, mannerisms, verbal tics from which a Fyodor Pavlovich or a Smerdyakov would emerge, and how he would try out these voices, writing many pages of dialogue that would never be used in the novel. The publication of his notebooks in the 1930s finally dispelled the old prejudice that Dostoevsky was a careless and indifferent stylist. All the oddities of his prose are deliberate; they are a sort of “learned ignorance,” a willed imperfection of artistic means, that is essential to his vision. I will give some examples here, which will also suggest how and why we have made this translation.

The first voice to be heard in The Brothers Karamazov is the narrrator’s. Needless to say, he is not Dostoevsky. The brief note “From the Author” at the start of the book, which the “author” himself calls “superfluous,” accomplishes a number of important things by way of introduction, but above all it introduces us to the whole stylistic complex of the narrator’s voice: his hedged assertions (“One thing, perhaps, is rather doubtless”); his rare poetic flights (“some kind of flooding wind”); his repetitions, emphatic or humorous (“Being at a loss to resolve these questions, I am resolved to leave them without any resolution”); his idiosyncratic use of such words as “even,” “almost,” “some,” and a battery of indefinite expressions (“as it were,” “as if,” “apparently”); his mixed diction and sometimes wandering syntax. He has a penchant for compound modifiers, which he often forms incorrectly (at one point he writes: “Ivan Fyodorovich was convinced beyond doubt of his complete and extremely ill condition”). Among his most common tics is the fused cliché, as when he refers to the monk from Obdorsk as “the distant visitor”—a fusion of “visitor from far away” and “distant land.” He will get stuck on a particular word, repeat if five times in half a page, and then never use it again. His sentences tend to flounder most when he is most serious, notably when he talks about Alyosha Karamazov. But he can be quite pointed when skewering someone he does not like—for instance, Pyotr Alexandrovich Miusov. And within his scope, which is that of an amateur writer, and more of a talker than a writer, he has his own artistry: he often uses internal rhyme or assonance (“splintered and scattered”); he sometimes allows himself triple alliterations (“a weak, wailing, woeful voice”).

There are stretches when the person of the “author” seems to recede and be replaced by a more conventional omniscient narrator, but his voice will suddenly re-emerge in a phrase or half-phrase, giving an unexpected double tone or double point of view to the passage. Dostoevsky is famous for his pathetic scenes, yet there is perhaps no such scene in The Brothers Karamazov that is not stylistically counterpointed and lightened by the narrator. Captain Snegiryov’s house is described, in the prelude to one of the most pathetic scenes in the novel, as “a decrepit, lopsided little house with only three windows looking out onto the street, and a dirty courtyard in the middle of which a cow stood solitarily.” In another scene, Snegiryov’s cry, “Mama, let me kiss your hand,” is followed by the comment, “her husband jumped close to her and at once carried out his intention.” “Be pre-pared for any-thing,” the Moscow doctor pronounces, after informing Snegiryov that his son is going to die; then, “lowering his eyes, he himself prepared to step across the threshold to the carriage.” The novel is a tissue of such moments. By making his narrator a writer, and a writer with such pronounced personal mannerisms, Dostoevsky stresses the “writtenness” of the novel; but, perhaps unexpectedly, this has the effect of heightening the reality of the events and people he is writing about, of detaching them somewhat from the word.

There is indeed no absolute authorial voice in The Brothers Karamazov. Every scene is narrated from at least some personal angle, and where the narrator seems effaced, we find that his voice has shaded into the equally distinct verbal element of the character he is describing. These transitions are masterfully done. For example, there is the moment when Dmitri Karamazov is standing in his father’s garden just before the murder and sees the old man lean out the window: “Mitya watched from the side, and did not move. The whole of the old man’s profile, which he found so loathsome, the whole of his drooping Adam’s apple, his hooked nose, smiling in sweet expectation, his lips—all was brightly lit from the left by the slanting light of the lamp shining from the room.” Not only the thoughts but even the “style” of the passage, with its misplaced clause, are Mitya’s. We suddenly hear him speaking through the narrator.

Each major character in the novel has a distinct way of speaking. Dostoevsky was not interested in typical, regional, or class differences of expression, as many writers of his time were; what he sought in the voicing of his characters was the singular expression of the person. He delighted in the richness of spoken language, its playfulness, its happy mistakes, its revealing quirks and peculiarities. The prosecutor Ippolit Kirillovich, for instance, says “precisely” all the time (and finally infects Alyosha with it). The attorney Fetyukovich habitually says “robbed” when he means “stolen,” and at one point declares three of the five possible suspects in the murder “completely irresponsible.” Expressing his surprise to the investigators, Dmitri, who is a word-drunk but uneducated man, says, “I’m struck to the epidermis myself …” But these examples do no more than hint at the comedy of style that pervades The Brothers Karamazov.

“Life is full of the comic and is only majestic in its inner sense,” Dostoevsky wrote to a friend in 1879. He was talking about Book 6, “The Russian Monk,” which he had just finished, but the comment is revealing of the novel as a whole. It may surprise some readers to learn that The Brothers Karamazov is also a comic novel. Dostoevsky is often described as a dark and brooding man, and his novels have been called “novel-tragedies.” There is some truth to that, but it can be misleading. The darkness in The Brothers Karamazov is real darkness, the darkness of evil, not a product of the author’s state of mind. And the brightness—that is, the lightness—is also real. It is rooted in the word, the ambiguous expression of human freedom, not in any uplifting ideology. The comedy of style in the novel embodies movement and joy; it reveals the limits of language but also the freedom of language, one might almost say the freedom from language.

The Brothers Karamazov is, among many other things, a novel about the word in all senses, from the incarnate Word of God to the emptiest banality. In the process of its composition it seems to have swallowed a small library: it is full of quotations, imitations, allusions. Its characters are not only speakers, most of them are also writers: they write letters, articles, poems, pamphlets, tracts, memoirs, suicide notes. They perform, make speeches, tell jokes; they preach and confess. Words addressed, received, remembered, forgotten, carry an enormous weight in the novel and have an incalculable effect. Words form an element between matter and spirit in which people live and move each other. Words spoken at one point are repeated later by other speakers, as recollections or unconscious echoes. The voice of the elder Zosima’s long dead brother comes back in the elder’s last conversation. The dead elder’s voice is heard again by Alyosha and speaks through him. In an uncanny moment during the trial, the voice of Smerdyakov begins to sound through the words of the prosecutor. Ivan’s voice echoes in Liza Khokhlakov; Rakitin’s in Kolya Krasotkin. The tones of Fyodor Pavlovich are heard again from the devil in Ivan’s nightmare. In a curious doubling, words similar to the elder Zosima’s begin to come out of the attorney Fetyukovich, but devoid of meaning. The living element of speech is a counterpart of Zosima’s assertion that “each of us is guilty before all and for all.”

The word that “speaks” the person says more than the person knows; it can only be heard by others. It is dramatic in the highest sense, and the drama is played out in The Brothers Karamazov with all its negative variations on the lie, fiction, error, ambiguity, and silence. The community of speech is simultaneous: the words of the dead are heard by the living; the words of the past are heard in the present. The word bears within itself not only the possibility of the lie but also the possibility of memory. And much emphasis is placed on what a person is given to remember. Remembrance is the central theme of the elder Zosima’s talks and homilies, which were written down from memory by Alyosha Karamazov.

The “author” asserts that Alyosha is the hero of the novel. Many commentators have disagreed with him, as he suspected they might. They find Alyosha pale and unrealized as a character, too slight to bear the weight of the “positive message” Dostoevsky wanted him to carry. But why, I wonder, would he give such a message to a young man of twenty who hardly has an original idea in his head? Alyosha seems little more than a reactor to events. His opinions and judgments consist almost entirely of things others have just said to him, and are quite often wrong or absurdly out of place when he utters them. Dostoevsky obviously knew this. His critics, who expected something else, overlook the delicacy with which he allows us to laugh at his hero.

Alyosha is a novice in more than one sense: a novice monk when we meet him, and a novice human being as well. He has a compelling directness, which comes from humility. He is often called an angel, and within the intrigues of the novel he has the function of an angelos, a messenger, in the most literal sense. He carries messages, letters, requests from one character to another. He is not much of a speaker, but he is a hearer of words, and he is almost the only one in the novel who can hear. That is his great gift: the word can come to life in him.

Alyosha is saved at his darkest moment by his memory of the elder Zosima’s voice, as Zosima was saved by the memory of his brother’s voice. At the end of the novel, in his “Speech at the Stone,” Alyosha hopes to pass this saving word on to the schoolboys. Memory is the motif of this final episode, which starts from Alyosha’s sudden recollection of his talk with Captain Snegiryov and ends by evoking the prayer of “Memory Eternal” for the dead boy Ilyusha. It is Alyosha’s first homily, earnest and unoriginal, but counterpointed by a gentle comedy of style that lifts it into a new light.

Richard Pevear

List of Characters

The following list comprises the names of the novel’s main characters, with variants and pronunciation. Russian names are composed of first name, patronymic (from the father’s first name), and family name. Formal address requires the use of first name and patronymic; diminutives are commonly used among family and friends and are for the most part endearing, but in a certain blunt form (Katka, Mitka, Alyoshka, Rakitka) can be insulting and dismissive. Stressed syllables are indicated by italics. N.B. The z in Karamazov is pronounced like the z in zoo, not like the z in Mozart.

Karamazov, Fyodor Pavlovich

Dmitri Fyodorovich (Mitya, Mitka, Mitenka, Mitri Fyodorovich)

Ivan Fyodorovich (Vanya, Vanka, Vanechka)

Alexei Fyodorovich (Alyosha, Alyoshka, Alyoshenka, Alyoshechka,

Alexeichik, Lyosha, Lyoshenka)

Smerdyakov, Pavel Fyodorovich

Svetlov, Agrafena Alexandrovna (Grushenka, Grusha, Grushka)

Verkhovtsev, Katerina Ivanovna (Katya, Katka, Katenka)

Zosima (Zinovy before he became a monk)

Snegiryov, Nikolai Ilyich

Arina Petrovna

Varvara Nikolaevna (Varya)

Nina Nikolaevna (Ninochka)

Ilyusha (Ilyushechka, Ilyushka)

Krasotkin, Nikolai Ivanov (Kolya)

Khokhlakov, Katerina Osipovna

Liza (Lise)

Kutuzov, Grigory Vasilievich (also Vasiliev)

Marfa lgnatievna (also Ignatieva)

Rakitin, Mikhail Osipovich (Misha, Rakitka, Rakitushka)

Paissy

Ferapont

Ippolit Kirillovich (no family name)

Nelyudov, Nikolai Parfenovich

Fetyukovich

Herzenstube

Maximov (Maximushka)

Kalganov, Pyotr Fomich (Petrusha)

Perkhotin, Pyotr Ilyich

Miusov, Pyotr Alexandrovich

Trifon Borisovich (also Borisish)

Fedosya Markovna (Fenya, also Fedosya Markov)

Samsonov, Kuzma Kuzmich

Lizaveta Smerdyashchaya (Stinking Lizaveta; no family name)

Makarov, Mikhail Makarovich (also Makarich)

Mussyalovich

Vrublevsky

Maria Kondratievna (no family name)

Varvinsky

From the Author

Starting out on the biography of my hero, Alexei Fyodorovich Karamazov, I find myself in some perplexity. Namely, that while I do call Alexei Fyodorovich my hero, still, I myself know that he is by no means a great man, so that I can foresee the inevitable questions, such as: What is notable about your Alexei Fyodorovich that you should choose him for your hero? What has he really done? To whom is he known, and for what? Why should I, the reader, spend my time studying the facts of his life?

This last question is the most fateful one, for I can only reply: perhaps you will see from the novel. But suppose they read the novel and do not see, do not agree with the noteworthiness of my Alexei Fyodorovich? I say this because, to my sorrow, I foresee it. To me he is noteworthy, but I decidedly doubt that I shall succeed in proving it to the reader. The thing is that he does, perhaps, make a figure, but a figure of an indefinite, indeterminate sort. Though it would be strange to demand clarity from people in a time like ours. One thing, perhaps, is rather doubtless: he is a strange man, even an odd one. But strangeness and oddity will sooner harm than justify any claim to attention, especially when everyone is striving to unite particulars and find at least some general sense in the general senselessness. Whereas an odd man is most often a particular and isolated case. Is that not so?

Now if you do not agree with this last point and reply: “Not so” or “Not always,” then perhaps I shall take heart concerning the significance of my hero, Alexei Fyodorovich. For not only is an odd man “not always” a particular and isolated case, but, on the contrary, it sometimes happens that it is precisely he, perhaps, who bears within himself the heart of the whole, while the other people of his epoch have all for some reason been torn away from it for a time by some kind of flooding wind.

I would not, in fact, venture into these rather vague and uninteresting explanations but would simply begin without any introduction—if they like it, they’ll read it as it is—but the trouble is that while I have just one biography, I have two novels. The main novel is the second one—about the activities of my hero in our time, that is, in our present, current moment. As for the first novel, it already took place thirteen years ago and is even almost not a novel at all but just one moment from my hero’s early youth. It is impossible for me to do without this first novel, or much in the second novel will be incomprehensible. Thus my original difficulty becomes even more complicated: for if I, that is, the biographer himself, think that even one novel may, perhaps, be unwarranted for such a humble and indefinite hero, then how will it look if I appear with two; and what can explain such presumption on my part?

Being at a loss to resolve these questions, I am resolved to leave them without any resolution. To be sure, the keen-sighted reader will already have guessed long ago that that is what I’ve been getting at from the very beginning and will only be annoyed with me for wasting fruitless words and precious time. To this I have a ready answer: I have been wasting fruitless words and precious time, first, out of politeness, and, second, out of cunning. At least I have given some warning beforehand. In fact, I am even glad that my novel broke itself into two stories “while preserving the essential unity of the whole”: having acquainted himself with the first story, the reader can decide for himself whether it is worth his while to begin the second. Of course, no one is bound by anything; he can also drop the book after two pages of the first story and never pick it up again. But still there are readers of such delicacy that they will certainly want to read to the very end so as to make no mistake in their impartial judgment. Such, for instance, are all Russian critics. Faced with these people, I feel easier in my heart: for, in spite of their care and conscientiousness, I am nonetheless providing them with the most valid pretext for dropping the story at the first episode of the novel. Well, that is the end of my introduction. I quite agree that it is superfluous, but since it is already written, let it stand.

And now to business.

PART I

PART II

PART III

PART IV

BOOK I: A NICE LITTLE FAMILY

Chapter 1

Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov

ALEXEI FYODOROVICH KARAMAZOV was the third son of a landowner from our district, Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov, well known in his own day (and still remembered among us) because of his dark and tragic death, which happened exactly thirteen years ago and which I shall speak of in its proper place. For the moment I will only say of this “landowner” (as we used to call him, though for all his life he hardly ever lived on his estate) that he was a strange type, yet one rather frequently met with, precisely the type of man who is not only worthless and depraved but muddleheaded as well—one of those muddleheaded people who still handle their own little business deals quite skillfully, if nothing else. Fyodor Pavlovich, for instance, started with next to nothing, he was a very small landowner, he ran around having dinner at other men’s tables, he tried to foist himself off as a sponger, and yet at his death he was discovered to have as much as a hundred thousand roubles in hard cash. At the same time he remained all his life one of the most muddleheaded madcaps in our district. Again I say it was not stupidity—most of these madcaps are rather clever and shrewd—but precisely muddleheadedness, even a special, national form of it.

He was married twice and had three sons—the eldest, Dmitri Fyodorovich, by his first wife, and the other two, Ivan and Alexei, by his second. Fyodor Pavlovich’s first wife belonged to a rather wealthy aristocratic family, the Miusovs, also landowners in our district. Precisely how it happened that a girl with a dowry, a beautiful girl, too, and moreover one of those pert, intelligent girls not uncommon in this generation but sometimes also to be found in the last, could have married such a worthless “runt,” as everyone used to call him, I cannot begin to explain. But then, I once knew a young lady still of the last “romantic” generation who, after several years of enigmatic love for a certain gentleman, whom, by the way, she could have married quite easily at any moment, ended up, after inventing all sorts of insurmountable obstacles, by throwing herself on a stormy night into a rather deep and swift river from a high bank somewhat resembling a cliff, and perished there decidedly by her own caprice, only because she wanted to be like Shakespeare’s Ophelia. Even then, if the cliff, chosen and cherished from long ago, had not been so picturesque, if it had been merely a flat, prosaic bank, the suicide might not have taken place at all. This is a true fact, and one can assume that in our Russian life of the past two or three generations there have been not a few similar facts. In the same way, the action of Adelaida Ivanovna Miusov was doubtless an echo of foreign influences, the chafings of a mind imprisoned.1 Perhaps she wanted to assert her feminine independence, to go against social conventions, against the despotism of her relatives and family, and her obliging imagination convinced her, if only briefly, that Fyodor Pavlovich, despite his dignity as a sponger, was still one of the boldest and most sarcastic spirits of that transitional epoch—transitional to everything better—whereas he was simply an evil buffoon and nothing more. The affair gained piquancy from elopement, which strongly appealed to Adelaida Ivanovna. As for Fyodor Pavlovich, his social position at the time made him quite ready for any such venture, for he passionately desired to set himself up by whatever means. To squeeze into a good family and get a dowry was tempting indeed. As for mutual love, it seems there never was any either on the bride’s part or on his own, despite the beauty of Adelaida Ivanovna. This was, perhaps, the only case of its kind in Fyodor Pavlovich’s life, for he was a great sensualist all his days, always ready to hang onto any skirt that merely beckoned to him. This one woman alone, sensually speaking, made no particular impression on him.

They had no sooner eloped than it became clear to Adelaida Ivanovna that she felt only contempt for her husband and nothing more. Thus the consequences of their marriage revealed themselves extraordinarily quickly. And though her family even accepted the situation fairly soon and allotted the runaway bride her dowry, the married couple began leading a very disorderly life, full of eternal scenes. It was said that in the circumstances the young wife showed far more dignity and high-mindedness than did Fyodor Pavlovich, who, as is now known, filched all her cash from her, as much as twenty-five thousand roubles, the moment she got it, so that from then on as far as she was concerned all those thousands positively vanished, as it were, into thin air. As for the little village and the rather fine town house that came with her dowry, for a long time he tried very hard to have them transferred to his name by means of some appropriate deed, and he would probably have succeeded, merely because of the contempt and loathing, so to speak, that his shameless extortions and entreaties aroused in his wife, merely because of her emotional exhaustion—anything to be rid of him. Fortunately, Adelaida Ivanovna’s family intervened and put a stop to his hogging. It is well known that there were frequent fights between husband and wife, but according to tradition it was not Fyodor Pavlovich who did the beating but Adelaida Ivanovna, a hot-tempered lady, bold, dark-skinned, impatient, and endowed with remarkable physical strength. Finally she fled the house and ran away from Fyodor Pavlovich with a destitute seminarian, leaving the three-year-old Mitya in his father’s hands. Fyodor Pavlovich immediately set up a regular harem in his house and gave himself to the most unbridled drinking. In the intermissions, he drove over most of the province, tearfully complaining to all and sundry that Adelaida had abandoned him, going into details that any husband ought to have been too ashamed to reveal about his married life. The thing was that he seemed to enjoy and even feel flattered by playing the ludicrous role of the offended husband, embroidering on and embellishing the details of the offense. “One would think you had been promoted, Fyodor Pavlovich,” the scoffers used to say, “you’re so pleased despite all your woes!” Many even added that he was glad to brush up his old role of buffoon, and that, to make things funnier still, he pretended not to notice his ridiculous position. But who knows, perhaps he was simply naive. At last he managed to find the trail of his runaway wife. The poor woman turned out to be in Petersburg, where she had gone to live with her seminarian and where she had thrown herself wholeheartedly into the most complete emancipation. Fyodor Pavlovich at once began bustling about, making ready to go to Petersburg. Why? He, of course, had no idea. True, he might even have gone; but having undertaken such a decision, he at once felt fully entitled to get up his courage for the journey by throwing himself into more boundless drinking. Just then his wife’s family received news of her death in Petersburg. She died somehow suddenly, in some garret, of typhus according to one version, of starvation according to another. Fyodor Pavlovich was drunk when he learned of his wife’s death, and the story goes that he ran down the street, lifting his hands to the sky and joyfully shouting: “Now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace.”2 Others say that he wept and sobbed like a little child, so much so that they say he was pitiful to see, however repulsive they found him. Both versions may very well be true—that is, that he rejoiced at his release and wept for her who released him, all at the same time. In most cases, people, even wicked people, are far more naive and simple-hearted than one generally assumes. And so are we.

Chapter 2

The First Son Sent Packing

OF COURSE, ONE can imagine what sort of father and mentor such a man would be. As a father he did precisely what was expected of him; that is, he totally and utterly abandoned his child by Adelaida Ivanovna, not out of malice towards him and not from any wounded matrimonial feelings, but simply because he totally forgot about him. While he was pestering everyone with his tears and complaints, and turning his house into an iniquitous den, a faithful family servant, Grigory, took the three-year-old Mitya into his care, and if Grigory had not looked after him then, there would perhaps have been no one to change the child’s shirt. Moreover, it so happened that the child’s relatives on his mother’s side also seemed to forget about him at first. His grandfather, that is, Mr. Miusov himself, the father of Adelaida Ivanovna, was no longer living. His widow, Mitya’s grandmother, had moved to Moscow and was quite ill, and the sisters were all married, so that Mitya had to spend almost a whole year with the servant Grigory, living in the servants’ cottage. But even if his papa had remembered him (indeed, he could not have been unaware of his existence), he would have sent him back to the cottage, for the child would have gotten in the way of his debaucheries. Just then, however, the late Adelaida Ivanovna’s cousin, Pyotr Alexandrovich Miusov, happened to return from Paris. Afterwards he lived abroad for many years, but at the time he was still a very young man, and, among the Miusovs, an unusual sort of man—enlightened, metropolitan, cosmopolitan, a lifelong European, and at the end of his life a liberal of the forties and fifties. In the course of his career he had relations with many of the most liberal people of his epoch, both in Russia and abroad; he knew Proudhon and Bakunin personally;1 and he particularly liked to recall and describe—this was already near his journey’s end—the three days of the February revolution in Paris in forty-eight,2 letting on that he himself had almost taken part in it on the barricades. This was one of the most delightful memories of his youth. He had independent property, valued according to the old system at about a thousand souls.3 His splendid estate lay just beyond our little town and bordered on the lands of our famous monastery, with which Pyotr Alexandrovich, while still very young, having just come into his inheritance, at once began endless litigation over the rights to some kind of fishing in the river or wood-cutting in the forest—I am not sure which, but to start a lawsuit against the “clericals” was something he even considered his civic and enlightened duty. Hearing all about Adelaida Ivanovna, whom he of course remembered and had once even shown some interest in, and learning of Mitya’s existence, he decided, despite his youthful indignation and his contempt for Fyodor Pavlovich, to step into the affair. It was then that he first made the acquaintance of Fyodor Pavlovich. He told him straight off that he wanted to take responsibility for the child’s upbringing. Years later he used to recall, as typical of the man, that when he first began speaking about Mitya with Fyodor Pavlovich, the latter looked for a while as if he had no idea what child it was all about, and was even surprised, as it were, to learn that he had a little son somewhere in the house. Though Pyotr Alexandrovich may have exaggerated, still there must have been some semblance of truth in his story. But all his life, as a matter of fact, Fyodor Pavlovich was fond of play-acting, of suddenly taking up some unexpected role right in front of you, often when there was no need for it, and even to his own real disadvantage, as, for instance, in the present case. This trait, however, is characteristic of a great many people, even rather intelligent ones, and not only of Fyodor Pavlovich. Pyotr Alexandrovich hotly pursued the business and even got himself appointed the child’s guardian (jointly with Fyodor Pavlovich), since there was, after all, a small property, a house and estate, left by his mother. Mitya did, in fact, go to live with his mother’s cousin, but the latter, having no family of his own, and being in a hurry to return to Paris for a long stay as soon as he had arranged and secured the income from his estates, entrusted the child to one of his mother’s cousins, a Moscow lady. In the event, having settled himself in Paris, he, too, forgot about the child, especially after the outbreak of the abovementioned February revolution, which so struck his imagination that he was unable to forget it for the rest of his life. The Moscow lady died and Mitya was passed on to one of her married daughters. It seems he later changed homes a fourth time. I won’t go into that now, particularly as I shall have much to say later on about this first-born son of Fyodor Pavlovich, and must confine myself here to the most essential facts, without which I could not even begin my novel.

First of all, this Dmitri Fyodorovich was the only one of Fyodor Pavlovich’s three sons who grew up in the conviction that he, at any rate, had some property and would be independent when he came of age. He spent a disorderly adolescence and youth: he never finished high school; later he landed in some military school, then turned up in the Caucasus, was promoted, fought a duel, was broken to the ranks, promoted again, led a wild life, and spent, comparatively, a great deal of money. He received nothing from Fyodor Pavlovich before his coming of age, and until then ran into debt. He saw and got to know