Mornings, she made porridge for her son David, and then, according to her biographer Carolyn Heilbrun, “she would go round the garden, while the dew was still on the plants, to kill the slugs; this was a moment of selfindulgence. I was wondering, since so many in this group own it, which translation you would recommend or which is the best? I repeat: here there was no question of stupidity; the bulk of these madcaps are really quite sharp and clever — but plain muddle-headedness, and, moreover, of a peculiar, national variety. Dostoevskys greatest novel is a story of murder told with hair-raising intellectual clarity and a feeling for the human condition unsurpassed in world literature. I know McDuff appeals to many who have English as their first language, but for me, it doesn’t take me all the way to a good understanding.

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. Suppose we have a person who’s perfectly sane, and suddenly he’s suffering from diminished responsibility,” is what Avsey has her say.Translated by Pevear and Volokhonsky, it beings with a short introduction by Dostoyevsky scholar Malcolm V.

She turned down an offer from Tolstoy’s close friends Louise and Aylmer Maude to collaborate on a translation of “War and Peace” and did it on her own. Pevear and Volokhonsky made it clear that their work is a collaboration—her Russian, his English—but they work in adjoining offices, alone. Initially, I found the Pevear and Volokhonsky translation to be the best, but all the sharp remarks about this translation destroying Dostoyevsky’s text made me look around a bit more. Cervantes complained that reading a translation was “like looking at the Flanders tapestries from behind: you can see the basic shapes but they are so filled with threads that you cannot fathom their original lustre.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. P/V,” as they would come to be known in the academic journals, went to work on “The Brothers Karamazov. Heartily recommended to any reader who wishes to come as close to Dostoevsky’s Russian as it is possible. The rooms are spare and light, and reminded me of apartments I had visited in many Russian cities, apartments of a particular intellectual variety, with the entranceway lined with bookshelves and volumes in Russian, English, French, and other languages. 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.