Read The Brothers Karamazov by email.
The death is announced in the first paragraph. Everything after it is 606 mornings of why.
Three brothers, a fourth in the kitchen, and a father none of them can stand. The narrator gives away the father’s death in his first paragraph and then takes 606 mornings to explain it — the trial at the end runs fourteen chapters on its own.
Two or three minutes a day, and every installment opens with a line reminding you where you left off.
A year and a half from now, you will have read Dostoevsky.
606 installments, one an email
- First published
- 1880
- Translation
- Garnett
- Installments
- 606
- Each installment
- 2–3 min
How long it takes
- Words
- 349,728
- Reading time
- 24 hours 17 minutes
- At 5 minutes a day
- 9.5 months
- At 10 minutes a day
- 5 months
- At 20 minutes a day
- 2.5 months
At 240 words a minute, the average for adult silent reading. Use your own speed
Why read The Brothers Karamazov?
Dostoevsky’s last novel is built out of twelve Books and an epilogue, 96 chapters in all, and most of them are a single scene: an argument in a monastery cell, a confession in a tavern, a stone fight between schoolboys. Nothing here needs to be held in your head at full length. The scale is deceptive in the other direction too — “The Grand Inquisitor” is one chapter and lands as fifteen mornings, and Book Twelve, the trial, is nearly three months of them.
We serialize Constance Garnett’s 1912 translation in the Standard Ebooks edition, cut at paragraph boundaries inside Dostoevsky’s chapters. The novel is cited by Book rather than by Part, and so are the subject lines, which carry his own chapter titles: “Book One, Chapter I · Fyodor Pavlovitch Karamazov,” and later “Book Five, Chapter V · The Grand Inquisitor.” Installment 1 opens with the epigraph from John 12:24 — the corn of wheat that has to fall into the ground and die — and then the first sentence about Alexey Fyodorovitch. Every installment after it starts with a one-line recap.
606 mornings is about a year and eight months, and under twenty minutes a week. The book takes its time deliberately: whole Books go by in which nothing is settled and everyone talks, and then Book Twelve puts the family in front of twelve jurymen — officials, merchants, peasants and artisans — and asks you to decide. At two and a half minutes a day the slow Books stop being an obstacle. They are the stretch where you get to know these people well enough for the verdict to cost you something.
Frequently Asked Questions
How long does it take to read The Brothers Karamazov?
About twenty-four hours straight through (349,728 words). By email, it’s 606 daily installments of 2–3 minutes each — a year and eight months, or about ten months at a premium pace of two installments a day.
Is The Brothers Karamazov hard to read?
Its reputation comes from its size and its subject, not its sentences. Garnett’s English is plain, the chapters are scenes with people talking, and most of the philosophy arrives as an argument between two brothers rather than as an essay. The one real pause is Book Six — Father Zossima’s life and teachings, three long chapters, about five weeks of mornings — and five weeks of two minutes is not the same obstacle as sixty pages on a Sunday.
What about the Russian names?
The same problem as Crime and Punishment, and the same fix. Dmitri is Dmitri Fyodorovitch and Mitya depending on who is talking; Alexey is Alyosha; the father stays Fyodor Pavlovitch throughout, which is the only mercy on offer. The one-line recap names who is who, and Dostoevsky’s own chapter titles in the subject line do a surprising amount of the work.
Which translation is this?
Constance Garnett’s 1912 translation, in the carefully typeset Standard Ebooks edition — the same translator behind our Crime and Punishment and Notes from Underground, so the three read in one voice. She keeps the older transliterations throughout: Fyodor Pavlovitch, Alexey Fyodorovitch, patronymics ending in -itch rather than the modern -ich.
How does it arrive?
One email a day at the hour you pick, with a one-line recap of the previous installment at the top. Free. Pause or unsubscribe from any installment.
Constance Garnett translation, Standard Ebooks edition, public domain. Texts from Standard Ebooks and Project Gutenberg editions. Not affiliated with either.