Translations
Translations of The Brothers Karamazov
16 translations are recorded in our catalogue.
These are the translated editions we hold records for. A translation we have not catalogued is missing from this list, not from the world.
This book in English
What we found when we looked into it
Written by a person, from the sources listed at the end. Where critics disagree, this says so rather than picking a winner. It is not a catalogue record and does not claim the same authority as the table above.
Researched 2026-08-18. PD rule as above.
Translations
| Translator | Year | Publisher/Imprint | Copyright status | In print? |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Constance Garnett | 1912 | Multiple | PD (US) | Yes — continuously reprinted |
| David Magarshack | 1958 | Penguin | In copyright | Not independently verified |
| Andrew R. MacAndrew | 1970 | Bantam | In copyright | Not independently verified |
| Richard Pevear & Larissa Volokhonsky | 1990 | Vintage/Everyman's Library | In copyright | Yes |
| David McDuff | 1993 | Penguin Classics | In copyright | Yes |
| Ignat Avsey (as The Karamazov Brothers) | 1994 | Oxford World's Classics | In copyright | Yes |
| Michael R. Katz | 2023 | Liveright | In copyright | Yes |
Reception
- Per welovetranslations.com, accessed 2026-08-18: Garnett "reads smoothly and feels authentically 19th century" but "left out the bits she could not quite get the sense of," sometimes eliding Dostoevsky's humor; Magarshack "modernizes... but sometimes sacrifices tone and humor"; MacAndrew is called "unsatisfactory" for changing too much; McDuff is described as more literal even than P&V, with dialogue that "sometimes sounds impossibly odd" and reads "rather dead"; P&V "restores Russian idiosyncrasies and humor through literal translation" but "some find it reads a bit clunky" with "jarring" word choices; Avsey is flagged as the deliberately domesticating, idiomatic-English option, retitled The Karamazov Brothers; Katz (2023) is described as capturing "dark humor, elevated language," rendering "lively, fast-flowing" prose "more accessible than P&V while preserving Dostoevsky's intensity."
- Origin story of the P&V project, as a data point on how their reputation was built: their first joint translation was The Brothers Karamazov, and Random House initially rejected the pitch — "No, thanks. Garnett lives forever. Why do we need a new one?" — reported by David Remnick, "The Translation Wars," The New Yorker, 2005 (professional critic/journalist, no commercial stake), as summarized via secondary discussion at languagehat.com, accessed 2026-08-18.
- Same cross-cutting critical split as the other Dostoevsky/Tolstoy titles applies to this translation too: praise (Wood, Heim) vs. rejection (Morson, Malcolm, McWhorter) of P&V's whole catalogue — Wikipedia, Pevear & Volokhonsky, accessed 2026-08-18.
Parallel excerpt
Only the Garnett translation was independently verified against primary text.
Constance Garnett (1912), public domain, US — source: Project Gutenberg #28054 (gutenberg.org/files/28054/28054-h/28054-h.htm), verified by direct fetch 2026-08-18. Book I, Chapter I, opening:
"Alexey Fyodorovitch Karamazov was the third son of Fyodor Pavlovitch Karamazov, a land owner well known in our district in his own day, and still remembered among us owing to his gloomy and tragic death, which happened thirteen years ago, and which I shall describe in its proper place."
Licensing: Public domain in the US.
Decision guide
This is the clearest taste-axis map among the Dostoevsky titles researched: McDuff for maximal literalism at the cost of readability, Garnett for smooth 19th-century register at the cost of omitted nuance and humor, Avsey for the most idiomatic/domesticated modern English (down to the retitling), P&V for the contested "restores the roughness" middle position that half the named critics love and half reject by name, and Katz (2023) as the newest entrant explicitly positioned by its own comparison-site reviewer as more accessible than P&V while keeping intensity. No source in this research resolves the P&V question either way — it should stay presented as a live disagreement between named critics, not adjudicated.