Trasaay

Deep AF

This is an incredible book on so many levels! It’s helpful to use the internet or AI chat to help add clarity and depth to the reading. Definitely worth taking your time to do this since the book is so rich in texture, structure, and meaning. Dostoevsky is a genius is my opinion and an amazing writer and a great thinker.I think it’s a really good translation as well. Reads nicely and feels like it keeps true to the author. I especially like the annotations and additional references for clarity and further exploration.Pages are thick enough to hold light ink ballpoint pen when underlining/notations but not thick enough to handle more saturated ink pens. Not sure about highlighter. Definitely test your pen on a test page first. Second pics shows pen and underlining. You can kind of see it on the other side but it’s not bad. In the margins is show up a lot more. I’m okay with it tho.Ver más

2 personas la encontraron útil

Andrew

17 de mayo de 2026

The best translation of an incredible book

After reading this, I can absolutely understand why some consider it to be the best novel ever written. It manages to cover many different aspects of the human experience and philosophy, but never forgets to tell an entertaining story while doing it. It's actually a pretty raucous story involving jealousy, greed and murder, and is in no way dry as some descriptions might lead you to believe.And make no mistake, this is the translation to get. Other popular translations can sometimes read stiffly, fail to capture the humor, or lose the Russian feel of the writing. The book itself is beautiful, with a great cover and quality printing. Even though some editions may be a bit cheaper, it's more than worth the extra few bucks for the quality and the translation, especially since you're going to be spending a good amount of time reading the full 900 pages of it.Ver más

4 personas la encontraron útil

Brian Lewis

26 de enero de 2024

Masterpiece of Russian Literature

I will admit it is a little presumptuous to rate one of literature's great works anything less than five stars, but I feel I must also admit to struggling to get through this dense work. I realize I was bringing a modern viewpoint to a 19th century work, but it does feel to me that this 900 page book could have started on page 500 or so. He spends a lot of time setting the scene.I have liked almost all of the Dostoevsky I have read, and regard Crime and Punishment as a suspenseful page turner, but that was not the case here, until the later sections where the murder and subsequent trial takes place.At least, at last, I can cross it off my to be read list.Ver más

11 personas la encontraron útil

Molly T

22 de febrero de 2026

Excellent new translation

This translation is superb. I read quite a bit of Russian literature and found Mr. Katz’s voice perfectly captures the emotion of Dostoevsky’s writing as well as the many nuances of the era. He footnotes only when absolutely necessary, making for smooth reading… I also appreciated the actual structure of this book, it is a large and heavy book obviously because it is such a long story, but it laid flat open on my desk nearly from beginning to end!Ver más

5 personas la encontraron útil

Dostoevsky

13 de abril de 2026

Perfect

Great translation, great book quality, great book content, great design on the cover, buy it now

David Curry

5 de enero de 2024

Whose Translation?

I had my first encounter with Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, in the Constance Garnett translation, when I was a freshman in high school. All of us in Mildred Norton’s English class at Lanphier High School, Springfield, Illinois, were asked to select a novel and commit to it. After struggling through several chapters, I begged for permission to dump the book and select another, and she let me off the hook.I took up The Brothers Karamazov for the second time in my early 20s, again in the Garnett translation, and that time around it became one of the great reads of my life, although I still frequently found the writing cumbersome. I wasn’t alone in having trouble with it. Many readers and critics, not without reason, felt that Garnett gave anything she translated a decidedly British, Victorian flavor. (I was ironically reminded of this when in my most recent reading I came to the passage where the boy Kolya says to Alyosha: “I’ve read Candide in a Russian translation … in an old, monstrous translation, almost comical.”)Garnett is on record as saying that Dostoevsky is “so obscure and careless as a writer that one can scarcely help clarifying him.” She failed to grasp how grand his obscurity and carelessness can be. To boot, it appears that she simply omitted passages that stumped her.My third and richer encounter with Dostoevsky’s masterpiece came in my late 40s, when in 1990 the husband-and-wife translating team of Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky published their eminently readable version. I have since then recommended their translation.Now, in my early 80s, along comes a new translation by Michael R. Katz, who in his introduction, while commending Pevear and Volokhonsky and expressing indebtedness to them, maintains that “their translation is characterized by a too-close adherence to the Russian text that results in a word-for-word and syntax-for-syntax style that sacrifices tone and frequently misconstrues a passage’s overall sense.”For this reader, whose knowledge of Russian is admittedly nil, the choice between the two later translations is pretty much a toss-up. Either is a better choice than Garnett, unless you prefer to have your Dostoevsky sound like Dickens. Whatever your choice of translation may be, you shouldn’t complete your reading lifetime without encountering this endlessly fascinating, perplexing work. Don’t expect a smooth ride in any translation, and do be prepared to be challenged and astonished.In the current unstable national and world political climate, it’s jarring to recall that were it not for a whim of Tsar Nikolai I, the young Dostoevsky would have been executed and we would have none of his remarkable work.Note: All three translations retain Dostoevsky’s irritating reliance on the phrase “and so forth and so on,” which is the sort of shorthand that can seriously damage narrative integrity. The phrase occurs with such frequency that it becomes a tic. Well, readers, perhaps in the end we must allow masters their tics.