A Kiss Isn’t a Conclusion.

Daniel Soar’s LRB review (6 March 2025; archived) of Michael Katz’s new translation of The Brothers Karamazov is one of the best things I’ve read on Dostoevsky in a general-interest publication, and anyone interested in author or novel should read it. Here are some excerpts:

The first English translation of The Brothers Karamazov was by Constance Garnett. It came out in 1912, a good while after the novel first appeared, in serial form, in Russkiy Vestnik (the ‘Russian Herald’), over the course of 1879 and 1880, the year before Dostoevsky died. Garnett worked at great speed – according to one account she turned out five thousand words a day – and didn’t know Russian well: she kept a dictionary by her deckchair and skipped bits she didn’t understand. The (Russian) critic Korney Chukovsky called her translations ‘a safe blandscript: not a volcano … a smooth lawn mowed in the English manner – which is to say a complete distortion of the original’. But the British and American press loved it. The Observer praised Garnett’s ‘careful fidelity’, fully revealing of Dostoevsky’s ‘perfect balance’ and ‘sheer technical skill’.

Except technical skill isn’t really what the prose has to offer. At one level, you can’t disagree with Tolstoy, Chekhov et al [whose criticisms Soar has previously mentioned]: the narration is often awkward, full of little solecisms and redundancies. Presumably, this wasn’t the standard of literary prose Dostoevsky’s contemporaries expected. But there’s a rationale for the ungainliness: the story – or, as the text claims, the history – purports to be written by an unnamed inhabitant of Skotoprigonyevsk, the (fictional) small town somewhere in the provinces where the book is set. This writer is decidedly not urbane, well connected or particularly well educated – a long way from the Petersburg literary elite to which, say, Pushkin and Dostoevsky himself belonged – and he often slips into colloquialism or imprecision or makes the sort of unintended mistake it’s impossible not to laugh at.

The reason it’s easy to forget or ignore the fact that the narrator ≠ Dostoevsky is that much of the time he’s invisible. It’s only occasionally that he uses the phrase ‘our town’ or ‘our little town’ to remind you he’s actually there, reporting things he’s heard or repeating gossip he’s picked up. He rarely says ‘I’. The vast majority of the story is told from no point of view, and (necessarily) most of the dialogues that make up a large part of the text can’t have been overheard by anyone, especially since many are intense and private head-to-heads – between brother and brother, father and son, fiancé and fiancée – that take place in the sort of secluded space sought out for such encounters (a monk’s cell, a dilapidated gazebo). Significant players in the drama pay secret visits, navigating the back routes of town so as not to be spotted, climbing over wattle fences or garden walls to make their unexpected entrances.

What we have, then, is an omniscient narrator. Except, in a twist that seems to make no sense, where he does pop up to make a comment in his own person, it’s often to admit uncertainty, or to explain that what he’s saying is close to speculation. We’re told that the two younger Karamazov boys have each been left a thousand roubles by their mother’s wealthy benefactor, on condition that the money be used only to pay for their education. The narrator adds: ‘I haven’t read the will myself, but I’ve heard that there was something strange just of this kind.’ When we’re told that Miusov, the biggest landowner in the area, has brought a lawsuit against the elders of the town’s monastery, the narrator says he’s ‘not sure’ whether the issue is fishing or woodcutting rights. Fish or trees: it doesn’t matter. What does matter is that we see him trying to get it right. He isn’t the type of unreliable narrator later unleashed by Nabokov or Conrad or Ford Madox Ford: in fact, he wants to be as reliable as he can, but his limited knowledge will sometimes let him down, just as his country Russian does.

Obviously, this narrator’s style, distinguishable from the nominal author’s but not in ways that are always clear, is hard for translators to emulate. But they keep trying. The Brothers Karamazov has been translated into English a ludicrous number of times: since Garnett’s version (and five separate revisions of it), there have been translations by David Magarshack (1958), Andrew MacAndrew (1970), Julius Katzer (1980), Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (1990), David McDuff (1993), Ignat Avsey (1994) and, most recently, Michael Katz. Apparently there are at least eleven translations into German, nine into French, five into Spanish, and who knows what else.

Translators always tell us where they stand on the matter of fidelity – accurate but sometimes awkward, or fluent but sometimes loose? – though those who claim to stick closely to the original usually make more noise about it: no one wants to say their version is far removed from the book you want to read. I don’t find the debate, in the abstract, very interesting. ‘Literal’ translation is a contradiction in terms. Languages have different syntaxes, with Russian word order quite unlike that of English or French or Spanish, and many words in one language don’t have an exact equivalent in the other – the Russian for ‘dark’, тёмный, has connotations of the murky, the clouded, the unknowable, the obscure, as well as perhaps the suspicious or dodgy – which makes it impossible to render perfectly in English. The word turns up in the first sentence of the novel, as one half of the phrase ‘трагической и тёмной’, referring to the (later to be revealed) circumstances of old man Karamazov’s death. The трагической (‘tragicheskoi’) is easy: it’s a recognisable cognate of ‘tragic’, and there’s no alternative. The other word is much harder. Both Magarshack and MacAndrew render the phrase as ‘tragic and mysterious’; McDuff has ‘tragic and fishy’ – all this seems fine. Pevear/Volokhonsky and now Katz pretend there’s no issue by translating it ‘literally’ as ‘dark and tragic’. Avsey, for some reason, has ‘violent and mysterious’, and Garnett does ‘gloomy and tragic’. ‘Gloomy’? What does she mean? That the story is depressing? Avsey’s choice is problematic for a different reason: apart from everything else it is, The Brothers Karamazov is a detective story, with a large element of suspense: to say that old man Karamazov’s death will be violent is to give rather a lot away.

So the choices have consequences. And with Dostoevsky, these choices matter more than they do with most other writers. Take the infelicitous narrator: I’m guessing that some translators feel uncomfortable trying to match his not particularly great phrasing – what if the reader thinks it’s the translator being sloppy? But his language says something about the book, a novel in which characters speak in opposing ways, with their verbal tics reflecting their education or lack of it and their position on the social scale, where some people are moralists and others are libertines, and where some are both. In this little town everyone knows everyone else, and gossip and rumour zip between them. People absorb what they hear, and their speech echoes the speech of those they’ve heard it from, so that even the university-educated types who habitually adhere to certain standards of talk often come out with a bit of homespun swearing. The narrator – sometimes seen, sometimes not – is part of this network, and he inflects the language of the whole text, the text which, after all, we’re told he has written. If you don’t give an indication of his presence behind it all, then you’re losing a large part of what distinguishes the novel from the unruffled and elevated works of other late 19th-century writers. Garnett omitted the narrator’s preface (‘From the Author’) entirely, allowing the reader to conflate Dostoevsky and ‘I’, which makes it pretty confusing (or nonsensical) when you get to phrases such as ‘our town’. You could say that she had a good reason: she was introducing a ‘major Russian novel’ to an English-reading public, and presumably felt it had to sound clever if it was to be taken seriously. […]

If all​ these translations could almost be of different books, it’s worth bearing in mind that the singular Bratya Karamazovy isn’t really one book either. I count three, when you consider them by genre. First, there’s the family drama: the question of old man Karamazov’s inheritance, which his eldest son, Dmitry, insists is owed to him. The shouting matches are ferocious. It doesn’t help that they are also fighting over the same woman, Grushenka, who cleverly plays them off against each other. Meanwhile, things aren’t going well between Dmitry and his fiancée, Katerina Ivanovna, not because Dmitry is playing around with Grushenka, but because both Dmitry and Katerina know the reason they’re still together is that Dmitry feels terrible about taking money from her and not being able to pay it back. To make things more complicated – and since two love triangles are better than one – Ivan, the middle Karamazov brother, is falling for Katerina, and she can’t stop thinking about him … So it’s a will they, won’t they situation – and what will this mean for Dmitry? The youngest brother, Alyosha, only wants to see the good in people and adds a sentimental touch. Of course, in good soap operatic fashion, there also turns out to be a fourth brother, old man Karamazov’s illegitimate child, the resentful and scheming Smerdyakov, employed as a servant in the house. He’s the one not to be trusted.

If you aren’t into romance, however, you needn’t worry: The Brothers Karamazov can just as easily be read as a detective novel. Almost exactly halfway through, Fyodor Pavlovich is murdered, his head smashed in. Everything has been leading up to this point. The obvious suspect is Dmitry, not only because he was heard saying ‘Maybe I won’t kill him, maybe I will. I’m afraid that at that very minute his face will suddenly become hateful to me. I hate his Adam’s apple, his nose, his eyes, his shameless sneer. I feel personal disgust. That’s just what I’m afraid of, that I won’t hold myself back,’ but also because he was seen running away from the house, and because not long afterwards he turned up at Grushenka’s with blood on his hands and face, carrying a large pile of cash. […]

Dmitry’s trial, a face-off between the ambitious young prosecutor Ippolit Kirillovich and the formidable defence counsel Fetyukovich, takes up the last hundred pages of the book. The courtroom is packed with prurient onlookers, riveted by every detail of the case, a tittle-tattling chorus of voices, each with their bit to say. However, if you’re a more serious-minded person, if you find legal drama tedious or predictable, then you can always concentrate on the third Brothers Karamazov, the big one. Faith and doubt, nihilism and rebellion, moral responsibility, the question of free will. Central to all this is the youngest brother: when the book opens, Alyosha is a novice at the monastery, following the teachings of Father Zosima. Alyosha – whom even his depraved father can’t help but love – is entirely benign, forgiving any fault, the mediator between warring parties, carrying messages from place to place. In his preface the narrator tells us that Alyosha is ‘my hero’, though he accepts that this should be for us to judge: we may not immediately see why he is special. But he is, because the novel’s grand debates depend on him.

The most famous, and most famously extraordinary, passage is Book 5, Chapter 5 – ‘The Grand Inquisitor’. […] In the cramped prison cell, the inquisitor confronts Christ and begins his indictment. In giving mankind the freedom to choose heavenly over earthly bread, Christ had asked far too much of the people, since in their endless daily struggles – their poverty, their fear, their unbearable knowledge that no one will come to their aid – what they needed was to have their troubles simply lifted away. What they needed was bread, not the burden of freedom, of having to save themselves. They needed a leader and guide. It was the Holy Church that came to their rescue, providing for them, giving them the direction and the certainty that in their impotence they could never find alone. Throughout this long and commanding speech, the prisoner remains silent. The inquisitor’s argument seems logically flawless. Or is it Ivan’s argument? In any case, in the face of this eloquence, it’s hard for a reader not to be at least half-convinced, or convinced for a moment, that the inquisitor has it right. The only thing that stops you being fully converted is belief, though it’s a different kind of belief from the belief in Christ the Saviour. We know that a body like the Spanish Inquisition – despotic, merciless, murderous – is, as a matter of unshakeable principle, bad. Tyranny is what we most abhor.

But it isn’t so simple, because it’s possible to translate the inquisitor’s argument into different terms. Poverty is everywhere, and people struggle to get by. The institutions that are supposed to look after them – providing health and housing, supporting them when they can’t work – do nothing of the kind. In the capitalist state, people without means are expected to make their own way; if they can’t swim, they sink. Only a few – the ‘elite’, a word that in this context functions no differently from the Christian ‘elect’ – are protected. Of course there’s an alternative, and it’s called socialism: a state that does provide, that redistributes wealth, that may even supply a creed. […]

Yet in this book there is no argument that doesn’t have its counter. As the inquisitor lays out his case, he can’t help getting a little frustrated at his prisoner’s imperturbable smile. Part of what he’s doing is provocation: he wants Christ to admit defeat. ‘Be angry!’ he says. But the prisoner isn’t angry, and he doesn’t say a word. Finally, the inquisitor reaches his ringing conclusion (I abbreviate): ‘Tomorrow, at the mere wave of my hand, this obedient flock will rake hot coals around your stake. For if anyone has ever deserved our stake, it is you. Tomorrow I shall burn you. Dixi.’ At this, the prisoner simply walks over to his captor, and kisses him ‘on his bloodless, ninety-year-old lips’. This is the moment that no one ever forgets. The ups and downs of Dmitry’s relationship with Katerina Ivanovna, the hard-to-keep-track-of envelope containing three thousand roubles that has disappeared from under old Karamazov’s pillow: all that fades. But the kiss: it’s the tingle down the spine, the surprise that suddenly halts thought. There are 350,000 words in The Brothers Karamazov, yet the ineradicable thing requires no words at all.

A kiss, though, isn’t a conclusion. This is a novel in which arguments are endlessly pitted against one another, where each fervently held belief collides with its opposite. The oppositions are made very plain. At first sight, each of the three brothers is an exemplar of one particular way of thinking, and of living, and they are totally at odds. Dmitry is the emotional one, impetuous, louche, out to please himself. Ivan is the thinker, sceptical, scrupulous, tormented. Alyosha: well, he’s compassion itself, totally free of self-regard. The extended dialogues between them, and between many others, are usually irresolvable. Who’s in the right? When both sides argue their case with such conviction there is generally no answer. ‘The Grand Inquisitor’ is a debate too, even though Christ doesn’t speak: his statement is the kiss, a concise but comprehensive answer to the inquisitor’s diatribe. Yet it’s still impossible to say that either of them has won. Prosecutorial genius v. the kiss: these antagonists are using different languages, and their arguments are incommensurable. […]

Dostoevsky never lets us know, in any of his novels, on which side he stands in a debate. Unsurprisingly, readers have turned for evidence to the statements of the man himself. By the time he wrote The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky was a public figure of huge renown, given to grand pronouncements about his vision for Russia and the blessedness of its monastic elders, represented in the novel by the figure of Father Zosima and by Alyosha (‘my hero’). But whatever Dostoevsky thought, his novel doesn’t think the same: it’s full of voices – contradictory, incompatible, all clamouring to be heard. It was Dostoevsky who led Mikhail Bakhtin – Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics; The Dialogic Imagination – to introduce the concept of polyphony to literary theory, as the only way of explaining a novel that says so many things at once.

But the debates aren’t only between characters; each person in the novel is capable of turning into their own opposite. At one moment Dmitry the libertine is roaring drunk in a tavern, yanking men around by their beards; the next, he is making the biggest sacrifice in the book. Ivan is clear-thinking and rational, Alyosha unworldly and devout. But it’s Ivan who agonises about the suffering of children, and Alyosha who may act as the sceptic. […] The characters in this book, then, can transform without warning into the character they were explicitly not: Alyosha can be Ivan, Dmitry can be Alyosha. Even the revered Father Zosima, sought out by people who travel hundreds of miles for his blessing and advice, can be someone quite unlike the wise elder we see. He tells his story in a chapter of autobiography: the unillustrious military career, the debauchery, the duel – he too is Dmitry. There is more than dialogism going on in all this. For a genuine debate to be had, pro and contra, the positions each advocate takes must be firmly fixed. But some characters are so close to each other as to be almost doubles – and it terrifies them. Ivan’s half-brother Smerdyakov has much in common with him: the same intelligence, the same susceptibility to nihilistic thinking. The difference is that Ivan resists it while Smerdyakov embraces it. […]

Describing The Brothers Karamazov is a lot easier if you have only one of its aspects in view. What I like about the novel above all else is that I still don’t know what it is. But I too am beguiled by one strand: Christ v. the devil (if you choose to see the inquisitor that way), and the devil v. Ivan’s fractured mind. Of all Dostoevsky’s oppositions, there is none so stark – and anyway, who doesn’t love the devil?

I wrote about the novel here (earlier posts linked in first sentence) and about Bakhtin here and elsewhere; I have been strongly influenced by Bakhtin’s concept of polyphony in literature.