The Stephen King to Dostoevsky Pipeline

The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky

“‘Calm yourselves, I’m not mad, I’m simply a murderer! One really cannot expect eloquence from a murderer…’”

It took me eight years to read this book. For twice as long as Fyodor Dostoevsky was condemned to hard labor in a Siberian prison camp, I struggled to read this book. The first 400 pages was a demoralizing slog; the second half was a captivating delight that flew by in a matter of weeks.    

I started reading The Brothers Karamazov some time in late 2015 and I finished on January 31, 2024. I’ve never been one to be intimidated by big or serious books, in general– I read Infinite Jest, a legendary clunker at 1100+ pages, twice– but there are a few big boys that have eluded me over the years: Ulysses, The Magic Mountain, In Search of Lost Time, and The Brothers Karamazov. 

After finally getting back into a somewhat solid reading habit after the distractions of the pandemic (which effectively nuked my attention span and had me starting and then abandoning books left and right), I decided I ought to finally get around to some of the doorstops of the Western canon that I’d either been unable to finish or simply hadn’t gotten around to yet. Brothers K was first on that list because one of my roommates in college, a man whose intellect and taste I respect enormously, had long claimed it as his favorite novel. When it failed to grab me, after multiple attempts, I concluded that something must be wrong with me.

I didn’t have this problem with the two other Dostoevsky books I read: Crime and Punishment was a thrill I devoured in a couple of weeks when I was 12 and Notes From Underground was equally compelling (and very short). Before that, I was a cultureless preteen, exclusively reading sci-fi and Stephen King, who I saw as the height of literary achievement. 

It’s hard to overstate just how much I loved Stephen King. In middle school I developed a little ‘SK’ logo that I doodled everywhere. I read most of the hits, plus I was utterly obsessed with The Dark Tower series, which I found all the more thrilling because it was ongoing— a saga King began in the 70s was still undecided when I stumbled upon The Gunslinger on the book table of my family’s local Costco in the early 2000s. The Dark Tower was my Harry Potter. This might give you some idea of what a weird little kid I was. 

Then, during my 8th grade winter break, my family went to visit my grandparents in Cincinnati. My grandparents maintained a beautiful library with custom built-ins and what felt like all the serious works of literature, philosophy, history, and biography. I loved reading in that room and smelling the books, but until then I had remained more interested in my space operas and horror stories. For some reason, on this trip, I picked up the Constance Garnett translation of Crime and Punishment and was immediately entranced. Raskolnikov’s feverish St. Petersburg summer burned through the pages and infected my cold Ohio winter. The potency of Dostoevsky’s psychological horror was revelatory. Somehow, it was even better than Stephen King! 

I credit this experience with kick-starting my love of literature. After Crime and Punishment, I continued to read Stephen King and Golden Age sci-fi, but I also sought out the greats of Western literature and began cultivating an aesthetic sense. 

And yet, all those years later, as I embarked on my Brothers Karamazov journey shortly after graduating from college, I just could not bring myself to care about these strange men with very long and confusing names making a scene in a monastery. The prose was stilted and odd, the paragraphs went on for pages and pages. I was reading the Norton Critical Edition of the text, translated by Susan McReynolds Oddo, and the notes were often more distracting than helpful. Sometimes, the critical apparatus would provide context on a certain obscure saint that was being evoked through a Russian folk tale, and sometimes the footnote that interrupted the flow of reading would be something like: “Alexander the Great (356-323 BCE), King of Macedonia, conquered much of the world of Classical antiquity.” Thanks for the gloss, bro. 

In 2023, I managed to joylessly claw my way through about half of the book, when I finally decided to try out a different translation. I switched to the Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky translation midway through Book VII, and the difference was night and fucking day. Suddenly, the prose sparkled and the characters came to life. The high drama and the brilliant madness of the plot shone through, and I was gripped. And it was funny! I hadn’t realized the Brothers K was such a funny book.

Here’s one passage from Book VII, Chapter III, “An Onion,” the Norton translation:

A letter was in her hand and she waved it in the air all the while she talked. Grushenka snatched the letter from her and carried it to the candle. It was only a note, a few lines. She read it in one instant.

”He has sent for me,” she cried, her face white and distorted, with a wan smile; “he whistles! Crawl back, little dog!”

But only for one instant she stood as though hesitating; suddenly the blood rushed to her head and sent a glow to her cheeks.

”I will go,” she cried; “five years of my life! Good-bye! Good-bye Alyosha, my fate is sealed. Go, go, leave me all of you, don’t let me see you again! Grushenka is flying to a new life… Don’t you remember evil against me either, Rakitka. I may be going to my death! Ugh! I feel as though I were drunk!”

Compare to the Pevear/Volokhonsky translation:

She was holding the letter in her hand, waving it in the air all the while she was shouting. Grushenka snatched the letter from her and brought it near the candle. It was just a note, a few lines, and she read it in a moment. 

“He’s calling me!” she cried, quite pale, her face twisted in a painful smile. “He’s whistling! Crawl, little dog!”

Only for one moment did she hesitate; suddenly the blood rushed to her head and brought fire to her cheeks.

”I’m going!” she suddenly exclaimed. “Oh, my five years! Farewell, everyone! Farewell, Alyosha, my fate is decided… Go, go, all of you, go away, I don’t want to see you…! Grushenka is flying to a new life… Rakitka, don’t you think ill of me either. Maybe I’m going to my death! Ah, I feel drunk!”

The differences may seem subtle— rendering in the passive vs the active voice, overuse of “as though” creating distance vs the immediacy of the latter passage—but taken page after page, each little choice the translators made adds up to a very different reading experience. The first is stilted and awkward, the latter is natural and potent. Of course, since I don’t read Russian I can’t compare it to the original, but I’d like to believe that to a native reader, Dostoevsky’s prose is powerful and alive.

For a deep dive into the process that makes the Pevear/Volokhonsky translation so special, give this excellent article by David Remnick a read. It covers the history of Russian to English translation, from the O.G., Constance Garnett, through Nabokov and P/V.

Christ! All that time wasted on a lifeless translation. I’m sure Dr. Oddo is a fine scholar of Slavic languages, but she lacks a poet’s sense for English. How was it even possible to make such a melodramatic soap opera like the Brothers K into a dull, lifeless, difficult read? I’ve begun to suspect it’s a conspiracy. Norton Critical Editions are marketed at undergrads, and I think they must have commissioned the Oddo obscurantist translation as a way of punishing the youth. “Literature should be difficult,” they said. And it’s true that Dostoevsky is challenging in the sense that reading him ought to lead one to challenge their beliefs and assumptions. But on a sentence-by-sentence level, it shouldn’t be hard to read. When translated correctly, the pages should fly by like you’re reading The Shining. 

TL;DR: Read the Pevear/Volokhonsky translation of The Brothers Karamazov.