Half of The Brothers Karamazov

It’s hard to know what to write about this most profound of novels. What could I possibly say that could add anything to what Dostoevsky has said? If you don’t read the book, anything I try to tell you wouldn’t matter. If you do read it, you don’t need me to point out to you that Ivan’s question about children’s suffering is devastating or that Alyosha’s summary life of his mentor in the monastery is inspirational. You’d notice without any help from me! So I’ll just say a couple of brief things about my reading experience.

I had difficulty deciding on a translation, but I decided to go with Constance Garnett, partly because her translation is cheap on Kindle, but also because I had read that she keeps Russian turns of phrase more than others. The book is strange enough to read with its Russian customs and Russian outlook; adding Russian conversational cadences only makes it weirder. But part of the reason for reading the book is to appreciate the perspective of the author in his time and place, so I prefer this experience to one in which the dialog has been translated so all the nineteenth-century Russians sound like twenty-first-century Americans. I know one way or another I’m reading Russian characters speaking English. But in my head, I want them to speak English with a Russian accent.

Mortimer Adler divided up The Brothers Karamazov over two years in the original reading plan included with the Britannica Great Works set. So that’s the way I read it the first time. I had never done such a thing before, but I was amazed at how well I picked up the characters when taking up the book again after several months. I started thinking about Star Wars stories appearing in installments, about Dickens books originally coming out in serial form over the course of twenty months, and about Cervantes publishing the conclusion to Don Quixote only after a hiatus of ten-years, and it occurred to me that splitting up the reading of a book over years isn’t as odd as it seems at first. Maybe I’m just jealous of my wife, who can sit down and read a whole book in a day. Anyway, I’ve split Karamazov up again. I just read half of it this month and then put it aside for the next book on this year’s list. I’ll finish it sometime early-ish next year.