Selected Works of Fyodor Dostoyevsky — The Karamazov Brothers (Volume One of Two Volume Novel)

The Karamazov Brothers
(Volume One of Two Volume Novel)

Translated by
Julius Katzer

Series Editor
Roli Jain

From The Author

I feel somewhat hesitant as I set about writing the lifestory of my hero, Alexei Fyodorovich Karamazov. The reason is: though I do call Alexei Fyodorovich my hero, I am well aware that he is not in any way a great man, which is why I anticipate some inevitable questions, such as: what are the outstanding qualities in him that have led you to choose him for your hero? What has he accomplished? To whom is he known, and for what? Why should I, the reader, spend time learning the facts of his life?

The last question is the most crucial, for the only answer I can give is: “Perhaps you will see for yourself from the novel.” But supposing that will not be seen from a reading of the novel, and the reader does not agree that there is something remarkable about my Alexei Fyodorovich? I say so because it is something I anticipate with a little sadness. To me he is a remarkable person, but I am most doubtful whether I shall be able to convince the reader of it. The reason is that, though Alexei Fyodorovich may have got things done, the manner of it has been vague and indeterminate. Yet in times like ours, it would be strange to expect clarity in people. One thing, perhaps, is beyond doubt: he is a strange kind of man, even an oddity. Strangeness and oddity, however, are more likely to prove detrimental than to justify attention. That is especially so in our times when it is in vogue to reduce individual particulars to some common denominator and to try to discern at least some overall order in the universal welter. In most cases, however, there is something individual and particular about an oddity, is there not?

But if you do not see eye to eye with me on the latter score, and reply: “There is not”, or “Not always”, then I may well take heart regarding the significance of my hero Alexei Fyodorovich. For an oddity is “not always” one who is merely individual and particular; on the contrary, it sometimes happens that it is he who bears within himself the very core of the general, while the rest of his contemporaries—all of them—have for a while been somehow swept from his side by a gust of wind, as it were.

I ought not to have launched into these very jejune and hazy explanations, but should simply have begun without any introduction at all: if the novel is liked, it will be read anyway; the trouble is that what I have to offer is only one lifestory, but two novels. The second novel is the main one: it is about my hero’s activities in our own days, namely, at the present and current moment. As for the first novel, it dates back thirteen years, and is even hardly a novel at all but merely a fleeting moment in my hero’s youth. Yet it is quite impossible to do without the first novel, because in that case much in the second novel will become incomprehensible. But that complicates my initial difficulty even more: if I, i.e. the biographer himself, consider that even a single novel may perhaps be excessive for so modest and indeterminate a hero, then why appear with two, and how is such uppishness on my part to be accounted for?

Since I am at a loss as to how these questions should be dealt with, I make so bold as to evade them, offering no solution at all. Of course, the discerning reader has been aware of that from the very outset, and has only been galled by my using barren words and taking up precious time. To that I will give a precise answer: I have used barren words and taken up precious time out of civility in the first place, and, in the second, out of wiliness: after all, you have been duly warned. Incidentally, I am even glad that my novel falls into two stories, but “with a substantive unity of the whole”: after reading the first story, the reader will make up his own mind whether he should set about reading the second. Of course, no obligation is implied: the book can be laid aside even after two pages of the first story, never to be reopened. But there are readers so tactful that they will certainly wish to read it through to the end so as to escape falling into error in forming an unbiassed judgement: all Russian critics are of such stuff.

Well, with such people, I can set my heart at rest: despite all their punctiliousness and assiduity, they have been provided with a legitimate pretext to drop the story after the first episode in the novel. Well, that’s the lot as far as an introduction is concerned. I fully agree it is superfluous, but since it has already been penned, let it stand.

And now for the story.