Note: The novel starts with a fictional author’s note, but Constance Garnett’s translation leaves it out. Since the narrator is very much a character in this novel, I think it’s important for establishing and introducing this character and his narration style. Plus, it’s extremely humourous. So I’ve decided to include McDuff’s translation of it here, before we start the read-along proper next week.
The McDuff translation of this novel is my personal favourite, and if you are looking for an English translation of The Brothers Karamazov, and you enjoy the style of this one, I highly recommend you go out and purchase a copy. 1
As I begin the life chronicle of my hero, Aleksey Fyodorovich Karamazov, I find myself in something of a quandary. To wit: though I call Aleksey Fyodorovich my hero, I am nevertheless aware that he is in no way a man of greatness, and thus do I anticipate inevitable questions of a kind such as: ‘In what respect does your Aleksey Fyodorovich stand out from the common run of men, that you have selected him as your hero? What has he done that is so special? Who has ever heard of him, and for what reasons? Why must I, the reader, expend my time in the study of the facts and events of his life?’
The last question is the most fateful one, for to it I am able to reply only: ‘Perhaps you’ll see when you read the novel.’ Well, and what if the novel is read and nothing at all is seen, the notability of my Aleksey Fyodorovich unconceded? Thus do I put it, as I regretfully anticipate that it will be so. For me, he is notable, but I decidedly doubt whether I shall be able to prove it to the reader. The problem is that while this man is, perhaps, an activist, his status as such is vague and unclear. Though in fact it would be strange in times like ours to demand clarity of men. One thing is, perhaps, fairly beyond doubt: this is a strange man, an oddity, even. But strangeness and oddness are sooner a cause of harm to their possessor than any guarantee of attention, particularly in a time when all are striving to unite the details of existence and to discover at least some kind of general meaning in the universal muddle. For in most cases an oddity is a detail and an isolated instance. Is it not so?
The point is, you see, that if you do not concur with this last thesis and reply ‘Not true’, or ‘not always true’, then I shall perhaps take encouragement with regard to the significance of my hero, Aleksey Fyodorovich. For not only is an oddity ‘not always’ a detail and an isolated instance—on the contrary, it may occasionally transpire that he it is who bears within him, perhaps, the very heartwood of the whole, while, for some reason, the other men of his epoch have all of them been wrenched loose from it for a time as by some tidal gale.
I should, as a matter of fact, have much preferred not to embark upon these thoroughly vague and uninteresting explanations at all, but quite simply and without ceremony to begin without a preface: if it meets with approval, the thing will be read anyway, but the trouble is that while I have one life-chronicle to write, it consists of two novels. The principal novel is the second—an account of my hero’s doings in our own times, that is to say, at our present-day current moment. The first novel, on the other hand, took place thirteen years ago and is almost not even a novel at all, but merely a single moment in my hero’s early youth. It is out of the question for me to dispense with this first novel, as much in the second would become incomprehensible. But in this fashion my original predicament is rendered the more complex: for if I—the biographer himself, that is to say—consider that even one novel might possibly be excessive for such a modest and ill-defined hero, then what do I think I am about in appearing with two, and how is such presumption on my part to be explained?
At a loss in the attempt to solve these problems, I have determined to pass them over without solution. The sagacious reader will of course have long ago divined that this is the point to which I have been coming from the very outset, and has merely been irritated with me for wasting fruitless words and precious time. To this at least I shall deliver a precise reply. I have wasted fruitless words and precious time in the first instance out of courtesy, and in the second out of stratagem: as if to say, ‘Well, I did give you some warning.’ As a matter of fact, I am even glad that my novels should of its own accord have broken itself into two narratives ‘in spite of the essential unity of the whole': having acquainted himself with the first narrative, the reader may then himself decide whether it is worth his while to begin upon the second. Of course, no one is obliged in any respect whatsoever; anyone may cast the book aside after only two pages of the first narrative, never to reopen it. But then again, there are, after all, such scrupulous readers as will wish to read the book to its end in order not to err in their dispassionate judgement—as, for example, all the Russian critics. Before readers such as these my heart is, I must say, lighter: in spite of all their exactitude and scruple I give them the most legitimate pretext for casting the narrative aside at the first episode. Well, so much for the preface. I entirely agree that it is superfluous, but as it has now been written, there let it stay.
And now to business.
The copyright for this translation belongs to David McDuff. I reproduce only an insubstantial portion of it here for noncommercial purposes, and it is not intended to nor does it serve to substitute for the original work.