Volume 38, Number 11 · June 13, 1991
A New Dostoevsky?
By John Bayley
The Brothers Karamazov
by Fyodor Dostoevsky, translated by Richard Pevear, by Larissa Volokhonsky
North Point Press, 796 pp., $29.95
Toward the end of the nineteenth century, when it became clear to readers in Europe and America that masterpieces of fiction on a huge scale had been produced during the last half century in Russia, there was a demand for translations. Anna Karenina appeared first in France and was reviewed in England by Matthew Arnold, who saw what a great novel it was, though he objected that Anna behaved in a rather precipitate and un-English fashion: George Eliot would have organized her temptation and fall as perceptively but with more decorum. The craze for Dostoevsky came later. Constance Garnett, the wife of a literary agent and man of letters, brought out translations of all his novels between 1912 and 1920, when his work was already well known on the Continent. Her knowledge of Russian was not particularly good and she was apt to leave out the bits she could not quite get the sense of, but she adored her work and her style had a natural animation and flow. She had already translated Turgenev, and her version of Dostoevsky remained the standard one until fairly recently, though there were more accurate renderings by David Magarshak and others.
Review, 2033 words
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