I repeat: here there was no question of stupidity; the bulk of these madcaps are really quite sharp and clever — but plain muddle-headedness, and, moreover, of a peculiar, national variety. It’s also a bit light on extra material: no character list, an introduction focusing on the biographical and historical context, some further reading (I want to know who actually uses this section) and that’s it.

Look to the best mysteries to solve as you lounge by the pool, take a refreshing swim through some historical fiction, or slip off to the cabana with one of our five favorite escapist reads. In the emotionally lacerating “Rebellion,” Ivan tells Alyosha that he has collected news clippings of the tortures inflicted upon small children. Put simply, Avsey’s language makes the text more direct and lands in my mind and heart in another way that the other translator’s texts do. I’ve just arrived, and have come to thank you for that pound of nuts; for no one bought me a pound of nuts before; you are the only one who ever bought me a pound of nuts. The particulars take up the bulk of Wilson’s attack, though he closes with some lapidary tribute to Nabokov’s mini-essays on Pushkin’s period, cohort, and influences.Wilson not only disapproved of Nabokov’s “bald and awkward language”; he also discerned in his friend a desire to “torture both the reader and himself” by “flattening out” Pushkin. After she emigrated, in 1973, she translated “Introduction to Patristic Theology,” by John Meyendorff, a Russian Orthodox priest and thinker. A very sturdy and attractive hardcover, I randomly picked this up from the library and it looks like no one’s cracked it open since they acquired it.

They just read somewhere or heard on NPR that it was the hot new thing, and they want a chance to use that penny of cultural currency before it loses its value.We learn that Fyodor may have fathered an illegitimate son, named Smerdyakov, who is now his unctuously obedient servant; that Grushenka was sexually abused by a much older man when she was just 17; and that Katerina planned to sacrifice her virtue to save her father from financial disgrace. The Brothers Karamazov stands as the culmination of his art–his last, longest, richest, and most capacious book. This award-winning translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky-the definitive version in English-magnificently captures the rich and subtle energies of Dostoevskys masterpiece. She worked with such speed, with such an eye toward the finish line, that when she came across a word or a phrase that she couldn’t make sense of she would skip it and move on.