The Brothers Karamazov
By Fyodor Dostoevsky
 
First edition, first impression thus, published by The Folio Society in 1964. 
 
Publisher's original binding of red cloth with a pictorial design in black by Lambourne, depicting a stormy sky over an Orthodox church with onion domes and crosses, printed across the spine and both boards; spine lettered in gilt; top edge stained grey. Twenty-four full-page line drawings by Nigel Lambourne, including the frontispiece. No dust jacket as issued; housed in the publisher's slipcase of mottled grey and black card. Translated by David Magarshack.
 
Fine: the boards bright, square and firm, the pictorial design and gilt spine lettering sharp; internally clean.
 
The slipcase near fine, with a few small and inconspicuous instances of superficial abrasion to the covering paper.
 
Dostoevsky's last novel, first published in Russian in 1880, the year before his death, and widely regarded as one of the major achievements of nineteenth-century Russian literature. Centred on the murder of Fyodor Karamazov and its aftermath among his four sons, it is at once a murder mystery, a family drama, and Dostoevsky's fullest treatment of faith, doubt and free will, its "Grand Inquisitor" section widely discussed independently of the novel as a meditation on freedom and authority. The novel has been adapted for the cinema on several occasions, most notably the 1958 MGM production starring Yul Brynner. This translation is by David Magarshack, the Riga-born translator commissioned by Penguin Classics editor E. V. Rieu in 1949 to translate Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, the first of several Dostoevsky novels he went on to translate for Penguin; he was also the biographer of Chekhov, Gogol, Turgenev, Pushkin, and Dostoevsky. The drawings are by Nigel Lambourne (1919–1988), who trained at the Royal College of Art and began illustrating for The Folio Society in the late 1940s.