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
In one 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 Karamazovand other works by Dostoevsky may intimidate the scholar and critic, let alone the general reader.
What makes The Brothers Karamazova 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 Karamazovseems 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 Karamazovwas Dostoevsky’s last book, published in serial form in The Russian Heraldfrom 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 Karamazovis a novel whose story has no definite end.