and that there’s a huge recent-ish controversy about whether they met or not in a long article that sounds batsh1t crazy! http://www.the-tls.co.uk/tls/public/article1243205.ece

FYI, the P/V translation is available from more than one publisher. I have a Vintage copy, the red one pictures is FSG, and I think it’s also available both from Modern Library and Everyman’s. So pick your preferred package. I’m actually reading the Vintage, which I found on clearance at Half Price Books some time ago.

Firstly, the whole BK vs. KB thing is somewhat interesting because it relates to the differences between Russian and English. There’s actually no good reason to have it as BK except that Russian, like French and Spanish, put the adjective after the noun. It sounds weird and a little exotic—maybe a little circus-like—to our ears but it shouldn’t. If anything, the emphasis should be on Karamazov, which is a strange Russian name and means “black smear,” which is significant and related to a strangeness about all the Karamazovs that finds expression differently in each one.

This all relates to the question of translation because what Pevear and Volokhonsky are none for is fidelity to the chunkiness of the Russian tongue. The tendency for translators like Constance Garnett and even my buddy Ignat is to soften it a little, make it a little more Continental. It basically comes down to whether you look at the original Russian and believe that Dostoevsky’s often somewhat blocky writing is attached to only the language or to the character of the language.

I have to admit, I often find it a little taxing as has been mentioned here when word choices seem odd. In particular, you’ll likely have a problem with repeated references to “a strain” which come up later and sounds really clunky to me. But I’m trying to embrace it and take it the idea that the chunkiness is not invisible to the Russian reader, but rather part and parcel of what makes this book so Russian.

It’s very concerned—as you’ve seen—with questions of things that are “uniquely Russian” or have a particular “national character.” Like almost all of D’s books, this is a central question: Is there something uniquely Russian about the Russian people that shouldn’t be bent to sophisticated, European tastes, even if it’s something self-destructive?