The old man is dead on the floor of his own house with his skull broken and three thousand roubles gone from under his pillow, and every man in the town already knows which of his sons did it. The eldest was seen at the window that night. He had sworn to kill his father over the money and over the woman. He turned up twenty miles away hours later with his pockets full of banknotes and blood drying on his hands, spending it on champagne for a room of strangers.
He says he did not do it. That is all he says, and he says it to men who have already stopped listening. What follows is the investigation, the year in a cell, and a trial that fills the town with visitors from Moscow and Petersburg who have come to watch a parricide sentenced. The brother who thinks he reasoned the murder into being sits through it going quietly out of his mind. The brother who is a monk is somewhere else entirely, at the bedside of a dying schoolboy.
This is Volume II of II, and it is the second half of the novel. Volume I comes first. This volume carries Parts III and IV and the Epilogue, Books VII through XII: Alyosha at the coffin, Mitya's night at Mokroe, the preliminary investigation, the boys and the dog, Ivan's three visits to Smerdyakov and the devil who comes to see him, the whole of the trial, and the plan to get Mitya out of Russia. Volume I carries the history of the family, the scene at the monastery, the Grand Inquisitor and the elder Zossima, and the year leading up to the night the old man died. Read that one first.
The split is not an abridgement and nothing is cut. Dostoevsky's last novel runs to about 350,000 words, which sets to roughly 980 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, 576 pages, set in EB Garamond and printed on 60# cream stock. Volume I 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.
Start here instead: The Brothers Karamazov: Volume I of II. Volume I carries the history of the family, the scene at the monastery, the Grand Inquisitor and the elder Zossima, and the year leading up to the night the old man died. Read it before this one. The two are set from one source in one hand and are meant to stand together on the shelf.
