[ZAtlLVos]

I've serendipitously come across this article on the Guardian site on the subject of the title of Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov. Or should that be The Karamazov Brothers?Dostoevsky's last, longest and possibly greatest novel has been known for nearly 130 years in English as The Brothers Karamazov. Sadly, this is wrong. It should be called The Karamazov Brothers. At least, so argues Ignat Avsey in his translator's note for the Oxford University Press edition of the book. "Had past translators been expressing themselves freely in natural English, without being hamstrung by the original Russian word order," he writes, "they would no more have dreamt of saying The Brothers Karamazov than they would The Brothers Warner or The Brothers Marx."
The question of the accuracy of the title in turn leads to a questioning of the efficacy of the translation as a whole. It's a bit much, I think, to consider over 1,000 pages as 'wrong' because of the placement of three words on the cover.