A provincial landowner who has made buffoonery into a career calls his three grown sons home to settle a quarrel about money, and takes them to a monastery so that a holy man can arbitrate it. The eldest wants the inheritance he says was stolen from him, and the woman his father is bidding against him for. The middle son has published an article about the church that he does not believe. The youngest is a novice inside that monastery.
Their father turns the meeting into a performance, insults every man in the room, and leaves a threat hanging over the household that all of them understand and none of them will say out loud. That is the first day. What follows is the year before a murder, told by a narrator who lives in the town and knows everyone in it by name.
This is Volume I of II, and it is half the novel. It carries Parts I and II, Books I through VI: the history of the family, the scandalous scene at the monastery, Mitya's confession of a passionate heart, the tavern where Ivan recites his poem about the Grand Inquisitor, and the manuscript Alyosha kept of the elder Zossima's last conversations. Volume II carries the murder, the investigation, the trial and the epilogue.
The split is not an abridgement and nothing is cut. Dostoevsky's last novel runs to about 350,000 words, which sets to roughly 970 pages at the size and leading this series prints at, and no print-on-demand binding holds that. The choice was to shrink the type until the book read like a phone screen or to give the novel two volumes. It gets two volumes, set at the same voice as every other book on the shelf, and the break falls where Dostoevsky put it, at the head of Part III.
Constance Garnett's translation, the one that gave Dostoevsky to English readers, complete and unabridged.
This is the Civil Savage Society edition, newly typeset in a 6 by 9 inch US Trade format, 408 pages, set in EB Garamond and printed on 60# cream stock. Volume II is set from the same source in the same hand and shelves beside it.
Hardcover: casewrap edition, built for the shelf and the long haul.
Paperback: perfect bound, the same interior, meant to be carried and read to pieces.
Print editions are produced on demand. Nothing warehoused, never out of print.
The other half of the novel: The Brothers Karamazov: Volume II of II. Volume I is where the novel starts; Volume II carries the murder, the investigation, the trial and the epilogue. The two are set from one source in one hand and are meant to stand together on the shelf.
