There are deaths, suicide, the death of a child, Ivan goes mad, Mitya goes to prison—and yet the book ends with joy. Constance won a scholarship to read classics at Newnham College, Cambridge, and after graduation she married a publisher, Edward Garnett, the scion of a family of English literary aristocrats. Of course, the novel had been translated previously, once by the indefatigable Constance Garnett, who translated more than seventy works of Russian literature into serviceable English, beginning in the early 1910s; and by the popular Anglo-Russian pair, Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, who had been translating many Russian novels since the early 1990s. He knew that if he didn’t finish ‘The Gambler’ on time he would lose the rights to all his future books for the next nine years. You must be prepared for anything,” said the doctor in emphatic and incisive tones, and dropping his eyes, he was about to step out to the coach.

Unlike Garnett, who started small and then worked her way up to the big, baggy monsters of Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy, Pevear and Volokhonsky began with the bulkiest and most complex masterpiece imaginable. His intention, as he makes clear in the introduction, is not to provide a traditional “poetic” rendering, a pleasurable English “Onegin,” like Avrahm Yarmolinsky’s, James Falen’s, or Charles Johnston’s noble attempts. In the first production of The Idiots Karamazov, at the Yale Repertory Theatre, Garnett was played by a student at the drama school named Meryl Streep, who portrayed the aged ‘translatrix’ as a muddled loon. Among the most astringent and authoritative critics of Garnett were Russian exiles, especially Vladimir Nabokov and Joseph Brodsky. As Dostoevsky himself added somewhat immodestly in the penultimate sentence (which I have taken out of context) of this magnificent novel: “Hurray for Karamazov!Let me repeat that unless these are thoroughly understood and remembered, all “general ideas” (so easily acquired, so profitably resold) must necessarily remain but worn passports allowing their bearers short cuts from one area of ignorance to another. Translated by Pevear and Volokhonsky, it beings with a short introduction by Dostoyevsky scholar Malcolm V. It’s a good test for any translation, because one of the rhymes is left unfinished—the narrator breaks off halfway through the second line and simply says, “There followed a most unprintable rhyme.

Mrs Khokhlakova, the mother, a rich lady who always dressed with taste, was a person still quite young and very pleasant to the gaze, somewhat pale, with eyes that were very lively and almost completely black. In fact, the whole novel supposedly serves as merely a preamble to a future, never-written account of his later life. It’s also a bit light on extra material: no character list, an introduction focusing on the biographical and historical context, some further reading (I want to know who actually uses this section) and that’s it.

Mrs Khokhlakova, a wealthy lady, always dressed with taste, was still quite young and very comely in appearance, somewhat pale-skinned, with very lively, almost completely black eyes. Their division of labor was—and remains—nearly absolute: First, Larissa wrote out a kind of hyperaccurate trot of the original, complete with interstitial notes about Dostoyevsky’s diction, syntax, and references.

Not long before publishing his own “Onegin,” Nabokov took to the pages of The New York Review of Books and, like the lepidopterist he was, picked the wings off a translation by Walter Arndt—which, to his rage, went on to win the Bollingen Prize.Again I say it was not stupidity — most of these madcaps are rather clever and shrewd — but precisely muddleheadedness, even a special, national form of it. A previous article on The Open Mic contrasted Constance Garnett, who in the early 20 th century translated great Russian authors into English, with the translation team of Larissa Volokhonsky and Richard Pevear, who in the 1990s again translated into English several Russian classics, starting with Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. To Ivan’s dismay, this down-at-the-heels Satan gradually reveals how the sensitive young man’s rationalism and rejection of God have led him to the verge of complete mental breakdown — and helped inspire the murder of his father.