The Brothers Karamazov: Translated by Richard Pevear & Larissa Volokhonsky

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Without translators, we are left adrift on our various linguistic ice floes, only faintly hearing rumors of masterpieces elsewhere at sea. Through the gripping events of their story, Dostoevsky portrays the whole of Russian life, its social and spiritual striving, in what was both the golden age and a tragic turning point in Russian culture.

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. 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. 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. 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.But perhaps you will find something, if not in the vocabulary then in the patterns of speech or the way the phrases are constructed. Fyodor Dostoevskys final novel, published just before his death in 1881, chronicles the bitter love-hate struggle between a larger-than-life father and his three very different sons. Garnett is often wooden in her renderings, sometimes unequal to certain verbal motifs and particularly long and complicated sentences. A translation that has gained a lot of attention, positive as well as negative, is the one from Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. Volokhonsky’s sense of fidelity has obvious roots: she is confounded by any translation that has little sense of the original’s qualities as they play on a Russian ear and sensibility.

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. None of his books, not the early Russian-language novels written in France and Germany or the later works, written in English when he lived in the United States and Switzerland, were approved by the authorities. And then I remembered my happy youth, and a poor boy in the yard without any shoes, and my heart turned over, and I said: ‘You are a grateful young man, for all your life you have remembered that pound of nuts I brought you in your childhood. So most English-speaking readers glimpse Homer through the filter of Fitzgerald or Fagles, Dante through Sinclair or Singleton or the Hollanders, Proust through Moncrieff or Davis, García Márquez through Gregory Rabassa—and nearly every Russian through Constance Garnett.

Volokhonsky and Pevear felt that Dostoevsky’s humor as well as his lively expressiveness had been ‘lost in translation. This site uses cookies to deliver our services, improve performance, for analytics, and (if not signed in) for advertising.