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Table of Contents

INTRODUCTION

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

List of Characters

From the Author

PART I

BOOK I: A NICE LITTLE FAMILY

Chapter 1: Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov

Chapter 2: The First Son Sent Packing

Chapter 3: Second Marriage, Second Children

Chapter 4: The Third Son, Alyosha

Chapter 5: Elders

BOOK II: AN INAPPROPRIATE GATHERING

Chapter 1: They Arrive at the Monastery

Chapter 2: The Old Buffoon

Chapter 3: Women of Faith

Chapter 4: A Lady of Little Faith

Chapter 5: So Be It! So Be It!

Chapter 6: Why Is Such a Man Alive!

Chapter 7: A Seminarist-Careerist

Chapter 8: Scandal

BOOK III: THE SENSUALISTS

Chapter 1: In the Servants’ Quarters

Chapter 2: Stinking Lizaveta

Chapter 3: The Confession of an Ardent Heart. In Verse

Chapter 4: The Confession of an Ardent Heart. In Anecdotes

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

Chapter 6: Smerdyakov

Chapter 7: Disputation

Chapter 8: Over the Cognac

Chapter 9: The Sensualists

Chapter 10: The Two Together

Chapter 11: One More Ruined Reputation

PART II

BOOK IV: STRAINS

Chapter 1: Father Ferapont

Chapter 2: At His Father’s

Chapter 3: He Gets Involved with Schoolboys

Chapter 4: At the Khokhlakovs’

Chapter 5: Strain in the Drawing Room

Chapter 6: Strain in the Cottage

Chapter 7: And in the Fresh Air

BOOK V: PRO AND CONTRA

Chapter 1: A Betrothal

Chapter 2: Smerdyakov with a Guitar

Chapter 3: The Brothers Get Acquainted :

Chapter 4: Rebellion

Chapter 5: The Grand Inquisitor

Chapter 6: A Rather Obscure One for the Moment

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

BOOK VI: THE RUSSIAN MONK

Chapter 1: The Elder Zosima and His Visitors

Chapter 2: From the Life of the Hieromonk and Elder Zosima,

Chapter 3

PART III

BOOK VIII: MITYA

Chapter 1: Kuzma Samsonov

Chapter 2: Lyagavy

Chapter 3: Gold Mines

Chapter 4: In the Dark

Chapter 5: A Sudden Decision

Chapter 6: Here I Come!

Chapter 7: The Former and Indisputable One

Chapter 8: Delirium

Chapter 1: The Start of the Official Perkhotin’s Career

Chapter 2: The Alarm

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

Chapter 4: The Second Torment

Chapter 5: The Third Torment

Chapter 6: The Prosecutor Catches Mitya

Chapter 7: Mitya’s Great Secret. Met with Hisses

Chapter 8: The Evidence of the Witnesses. The Wee One

Chapter 9: Mitya Is Taken Away

PART IV

BOOK X: BOYS

Chapter 1: Kolya Krasotkin

Chapter 2: Kids

Chapter 3: A Schoolboy

Chapter 4: Zhuchka

Chapter 5: At Ilyusha’s Bedside

Chapter 6: Precocity

Chapter 7: Ilyusha

Chapter 1: At Grushenka’s

Chapter 2: An Ailing Little Foot

Chapter 3: A Little Demon

Chapter 4: A Hymn and a Secret

Chapter 5: Not You! Not You!

Chapter 6: The First Meeting with Smerdyakov

Chapter 7: The Second Visit to Smerdyakov

Chapter 8: The Third and Last Meeting with Smerdyakov

Chapter 9: The Devil. Ivan Fyodorovich’s Nightmare

Chapter 10: “He Said That!”

Chapter 1: The Fatal Day

Chapter 2: Dangerous Witnesses

Chapter 3: Medical Expertise and One Pound of Nuts

Chapter 4: Fortune Smiles on Mitya

Chapter 5: A Sudden Catastrophe

Chapter 6: The Prosecutor’s Speech. Characterizations

Chapter 7: A Historical Survey

Chapter 8: A Treatise on Smerdyakov

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

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

Chapter 11: There Was No Money. There Was No Robbery

Chapter 12: And There Was No Murder Either

Chapter 13: An Adulterer of Thought

Chapter 14: Our Peasants Stood Up for Themselves

EPILOGUE

NOTES

The Brothers Karamazov

FYODOR DOSTOEVSKY

Translated from the Russian by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky

© 1992

ISBN: 0679410031

INTRODUCTION

Inone sense the introduction to a classic is superfluous. Having established a claim on our attention, it is for each reader to respond in his or her own way. Yet the very fact that a novel has become a classic suggests that there is more to the claim than immediately meets the eye. Even a vague awareness of the hundreds of books and thousands of articles (or is it now thousands and hundreds of thousands?) on The Brothers Karamazov and other works by Dostoevsky may intimidate the scholar and critic, let alone the general reader.

What makes The Brothers Karamazov a literary classic? It is easy to list some of the superficial reasons. Over a century after publication it remains a readable, up-to-date, entertaining and thought-provoking novel of action, its plot pivoting on those standbys of the best-seller – murder, violence and sexual rivalry.

At a deeper level, its characters and the dramatic events in which they participate continue to agitate the memory long after the book has been put down. Ivan, Dmitri or Alyosha Karamazov, what they say, their emotional torments, their clash of personalities, how they react to dramatic events, readily spring to mind in discussions of the modern condition. Dostoevsky’s characters are men and women under stress, victims of modern neuroses, in the grip of modern ideas. Their presentation, while eminently readable in realistic terms, has also provoked comparisons with modernist and postmodernist fiction. Indeed, not least of the novel’s claims to classic status is that it has continued, it seems, to stimulate and to find an echo in every significant intellectual development to have gripped the western mind since its appearance.

Yet it is not just that The Brothers Karamazov seems contemporary and relevant to every succeeding generation — like that famous portrait whose eyes seem to follow you round the room; it also echoes and develops some of the most ancient paradoxes and preoccupations of humanity and foresees intellectual, social and political developments of our own time. It was the French existentialist Albert Camus who said that Dostoevsky not Karl Marx was the great prophet of the twentieth century. No less interestingly, though more difficult to fathom, Albeit Einstein declared that he had learnt more from Dostoevsky than from any other thinker.

‘Does Dostoevsky then simply use the novel form as a vehicle for his philosophical and religious ideas, for prophecy and psychological experiment? The reactions of some critics, in his own day as much as in ours, might lead one to think so. There they are on the shelves: works on Dostoevsky and theology, psychology, philosophy and so forth. But the important point is that for Dostoevsky himself only imaginative fiction is capable of expressing what matters about the human condition. It does not always do so, especially in the work of the ‘realists’ of his day at whom he was always having a dig. Yet at its best, it is capable not simply of entertaining, telling a good story or providing a social chronicle, but also of plumbing and illuminating the depths of the human soul. In Dostoevsky, one might say following his own line of thought, the novel finds its true vocation.

The Brothers Karamazov was Dostoevsky’s last book, published in serial form in The Russian Herald from January 1879 to November 1880, and is generally held to represent the synthesis and culmination of his entire work. It appeared as a single volume almost immediately its serialization was complete, bearing the date 1881. The prefatory note called ‘From the author’ indicates that there was to be a sequel and it is widely assumed that we were denied this only by Dostoevsky’s untimely death on 28 January 1881. (All dates are given according to the pre-revolutionary calendar which was twelve days behind ours in the nineteenth century.) But Dostoevsky could easily have (hanged his mind. The surviving notebooks for his novels show how often he did this. What we have is a tent which, because it claims to be incomplete, stimulates the reader to imagine how it might have continued and that is much more important than any fragmentary evidence of what was in Dostoevsky’s mind: for whatever reason The Brothers Karamazov is a novel whose story has no definite end.