Fyodor Mikailovich Dostoevsky's life was as dark and dramatic as
the great novels he wrote. He was born in Moscow in 1821. A short
first novel, Poor Folk (1846) brought him instant success,
but his writing career was cut short by his arrest for alleged
subversion against Tsar Nicholas I in 1849. In prison he was given
the "silent treatment" for eight months (guards even wore velvet
soled boots) before he was led in front a firing squad. Dressed in
a death shroud, he faced an open grave and awaited execution, when
suddenly, an order arrived commuting his sentence. He then spent
four years at hard labor in a Siberian prison, where he began to
suffer from epilepsy, and he returned to St. Petersburg only a full
ten years after he had left in chains.
His prison experiences coupled with his conversion to a profoundly
religious philosophy formed the basis for his great novels. But it
was his fortuitous marriage to Anna Snitkina, following a period of
utter destitution brought about by his compulsive gambling, that
gave Dostoevsky the emotional stability to complete Crime and
Punishment (1866), The Idiot (1868-69), The
Possessed (1871-72), and The Brothers Karamazov
(1879-80). When Dostoevsky died in 1881, he left a legacy of
masterworks that influenced the great thinkers and writers of the
Western world and immortalized him as a giant among writers of
world literature.
Praise for previous translations by Richard Pevear and Larissa
Volokhonsky, winners of the PEN/Book-of-the-Month Club Prize
The Brothers Karamazov
"One finally gets the musical
whole of Dostoevsky's original." -New York Times Book
Review
"It may well be that Dostoevsky's [world], with all its resourceful
energies of life and language, is only now-and through the medium
of [this] new translation-beginning to come home to the
English-speaking reader." -New York Review of Books
Crime and Punishment
"The best [translation] currently
available...An especially faithful re-creation...with a
coiled-spring kinetic energy... Don't miss it." -Washington Post
Book World
"Reaches as close to Dostoevsky's Russian as is possible in
English...The original's force and frightening immediacy is
captured...The Pevear and Volokhonsky translation will become the
standard version." -Chicago Tribune
Demons
"The merit in this edition of Demons
resides in the technical virtuosity of the translators...They
capture the feverishly intense, personal explosions of activity and
emotion that manifest themselves in Russian life." -New York
Times Book Review
"[Pevear and Volokhonsky] have managed to capture and differentiate
the characters' many voices...They come into their own when faced
with Dostoevsky's wonderfully quirky use of varied speech
patterns...A capital job of restoration." -Los Angeles
Times
With an Introduction by Richard Pevear
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