Translators!!!!!

Sam Showers, Charlie Ebert, and Joseph Stay

__Pevear's Perspective__

Richard Pevear, along with Larissa Volokhonsky, give us the translation of //The Brothers Karamazov// that we are reading. Along with this brilliant translation, Pevear offers some of his opinions about the book as well as Fyodor Dostoevsky. One excellent example of this is his essay, "Dostoevsky's View of Evil," which is the introduction to his novel //Demons//. Here is the link to that essay, also accessible from the Dartmouth College researching center.

[|"Dostoevsky's View of Evil"]

This essay is essentially about how Pevear thinks Dostoevsky envisions religion, good and evil, God and man, and demons. Dostoevsky seems to be able to define demons, calling them "idea-forces" and "voice ideas" that form in the minds of humans, and that the demons seek to invert good things and make humans understand them as evil things. The opposite of this is ultimate good and perfection of Man, which is "the resolution of ideological quests," and trusting God for how men should live. Dostoevsky views evil and demons as the "distortion" of ideas such as freedom and liberty into corruption, anarchy, and tyrrany. Pevear then explains how Dostoevsky's ideas are related to the political workings of Russia that Dostoevsky was living in. According to Pevear, Dostoevsky was able to see that the ideas of things such as "idealism, rationalism, materialism, positivism, socialism, anarchism, nihilism, and atheism" would be distorted and corrupted, and turned into Man's denial of how God intended men to live. This is what is described by Pevear as, " a revolt against God." but it is not denying god. Inhabiting these "idea-forces" or demons is instead denying why God created us and how we should live on Earth. This denial and the distortion of such fundemental blessings such as freedom, along with logical falacies that are human mistakes, are what invert beneficial reform minded ideals such as the "isms" listed above into their opposite and destructive counterparts. From what we've heard about //The Brothers Karamazov,// along with information in this essay about the book //Demons,// it is clear that Pevear has a phenomenal understanding of how Dostoevsky viewed the supernatural world, and how he portrays it to his audience through his ideas and characters. Pevear gives us the insight that Dostoevsky's characters will suffer from demons, in that they will have flawed ideas and images, and that these demons will sebotage originally constructive and well-intended ideas.

In the latest introduction of the latest edition of //The Brothers Karamazov// that has been published, Pevear also adds his own wisdom and insight to the enlightenment of the reader as the reader prepares to embark through this epic novel. It is primarily the voice of the novel he discusses in these preceding pages; in fact, he states, "The style of //The Brothers Karamazov// is based on the spoken, not the written, word. Dostoevsky composed in voices." As one of the translators for this book from Russian to English, Richard Pevear is extremely credible, and even flipping through the pages of the book, this is evident. Dostoevsky lets his characters do the talking, both literally and figuratively as far as this novel goes, but also the narrator in a familiar, personal way as if the narrator were in fact one of the characters, and it seems as if the narrator should be included on the list of characters this latest edition of the book provides the reader. The narrator, though "not Dostoevsky," as Pevear assures, speaks as a being observing all the goings-on, whose own voice ranges from the "fused cliches," to "rare poetic flights" to his "emphatic or humorous" repititions. Though Pevear does admit that there are times when Dostoevsky's narrator's voice becomes less idiosyncratic and becomes the "omniscient narrator" that dominates much of literature, he also goes on to say that Dostoevsky will just as soon as he turned conventional bounce back to his familiar voice, to which Pevear finds some symbolism. The introduction Pevear wrote for this edition of the book is indeed very focused on voice, primarily, most likely, but he really gives a very basic, yet very informative and preparatory overview of what the reader is preparing to undertake, and with the seven-hundred-something pages that Dostoevsky has dedicated to the plot, character devlopment, and voice of this novel, it is an introduction that is very helpful, which seems understated when referring to the man who translated the seven-hundred-something pages in the first place. As Dostoevsky told a friend through a letter, and Pevear quotes it in his introduction, "Life is full of the comic and is only majestic in its inner sense," and Pevear believes that it is this personal philosophy of the Russian author that drives the novel, from the voice, to the subject matter, and, especially as the "majesty" he mentions, to the ideas regarding good and evil in this book and other works of Dostoevsky.