'The Brothers Karamazov' A New Translation by Michael R. Katz
Albert Einstein regarded The Brothers Karamazov as a work of genius. Sigmund Freud was drawn to it by author Fyodor Dostoevsky’s understanding of his characters’ unconscious motivations. Philosophers as divergent as Ludwig Wittgenstein and Martin Heidegger were intrigued by its ideas on free will and determinism. Novelists found inspiration in Karamazov as well, Cormac McCarthy and Kurt Vonnegut among them.
In Michael R. Katz’s new translation, Dostoevsky’s irony is more noticeable than in previous English language versions, which tended to muffle the humor. Katz’s rendering in plain, contemporary English sets the Russian author’s satire in high relief.
The Brothers Karamazov is Moby Dick in scale, but instead of a white whale, Dostoevsky sets forth in pursuit of truth, especially the spiritual and psychological underpinnings beneath the false façade of social life. The story is a family drama whose patriarch, Fyodor, is a cruel buffoon, a village Trump. His first wife left him in disgust. His second wife went nuts. His three sons were fortunate to have been raised largely in isolation from the old man. Each brother is fully drawn and represents a different human tendency but is realistically and fully rendered as only a great novelist can do. Dmitri, an army officer, represents physicality; Ivan, a university student, is an intellectual; and Alyosha, pulled toward a spiritual life, seeks the counsel of Zosima, an Eastern Orthodox monk whose teachings encompass the intelligence and beauty found throughout the natural world and stresses the idea that all of us are responsible for everyone else.
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Although set in a remote 19th century Russian village with a revealing name, Skotoprigonevsk (Stockyard), the characters and situations continue to resonate in our world today. Fyodor’s in-law, Miusova, is the sort of liberal whose “progressive” values and lifestyle is endowed by the labor of serfs. Homeless people definable in today’s terms as mentally ill roam the streets, as do impoverished people who can afford no roof for their heads. How many of us have responded just as Kalganov, who thrusts small change into a beggar’s hand, “embarrassed and in a hurry.” There was no meth, fentanyl or tranq in Skotoprigonevsk, but an endless stock of vodka to numb the pain of life. Zosima sits in contrast to his society’s widespread religious hypocrisy and narrowmindedness. The monk also has pertinent things to say about a justice system that doesn’t prevent crime but produces criminals.
Zosima teaches a love supreme, but the complexity of human nature, vividly and variedly displayed across the pages of The Brothers Karamazov, makes implementing his vision a supreme challenge. The paradoxical nature of personal and social life, marked by outbursts of kindness and destruction and long stretches of just muddling along, has seldom been as brilliantly described.
