The "wicked and emotional" Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov and his three sons-the impulsive and sensual Dmitri, the icy-cold Ivan, and the hale, red-cheeked young novice Alyosha-are featured in a series of triangular love encounters that explore erotic rivalry. Dostoevsky captures the entirety of Russian life-its social and spiritual striving-at what was at once the country's golden age and a sad turning point in its history-through the engrossing events of their story. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky's prize-winning translation, which keeps the original's numerous voices, comedy, and startling modernity, stays true to the verbal ingenuity of Dostoevsky's prose. It is an accomplishment deserving of Dostoevsky's final and best book. The Russian Orthodox Church, the legal system, and even the author's most beloved causes and ideas are all presented in the work with a sense of irreverence, removing the opposition between orthodoxy and radicalism, rationality and crazy, love and hatred, and good and evil. It was "the allegory for the world's maturity, but with children to the fore," according to Rebecca West. The creativity of Dostoevsky is fully captured in this novel, especially in the way he uses the spoken word to encompass all forms of human expression.
Constance Garnett was an English translator who, in the first half of the 20th century, made the great works of Russian literature available to English and American readers. She was born on December 19, 1861, in Brighton, Sussex, and died on December 17, 1946, in Eden bridge, Kent. She also translated all of Turgenev, Gogol, and the key Tolstoy works. She was the first to translate Dostoyevsky and Chekhov into English. At a time when women rarely attended colleges and universities, she was awarded a scholarship to Newnham College in Cambridge in 1879. Following her marriage to the critic Edward Garnett and the birth of their son David, the future author, in 1892, she began her career as a translator with Ivan Goncharov's (1847), which she translated as Tragic Story (1894). In total, she translated more than 70 books of Russian literature. David Garnett, her only child, and a biologist by training went on to write books, including the well-known Lady into Fox (1922). Garnett was elderly and partially blind by the late 1920s. After Turgenev's Three Plays was published in 1934, she stopped translating. She isolated herself after the 1937 passing of her spouse.
