The Brothers Karamazov: Translated by Richard Pevear & Larissa Volokhonsky

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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. One head is good, but two are much better, but he did not meet another head with wits, and his wits went. Garnett is often wooden in her renderings, sometimes unequal to certain verbal motifs and particularly long and complicated sentences. 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.

Russian intellectuals always seem to display pictures not only of the family but also of their cultural icons; Larissa kept photographs above her desk of John Meyendorff and another venerable Orthodox thinker, Alexander Schmemann. One 8-year-old boy, having accidentally injured a rich landowner’s favorite hunting dog, is stripped naked, told to run and quickly torn to pieces by the rest of the pack before his mother’s horrified eyes.This production, though in certain ways valuable, is something of a disappointment; and the reviewer, though a personal friend of Mr.

Everyman’s Library Classics include an introduction, a select bibliography, and a chronology of the author’s life and times. Tolstoy made the writing of Stephen Crane on the Civil War seem like the brilliant imagining of a sick boy who had never seen war but had only read the battles and chronicles and seen the Brady photographs that I had read and seen at my grandparents’ house. A very sturdy and attractive hardcover, I randomly picked this up from the library and it looks like no one’s cracked it open since they acquired it. In fact, the whole novel supposedly serves as merely a preamble to a future, never-written account of his later life. Apart from the occasional blog post at The American Conservative, there’s just nothing on fiction, non-fiction, TV, or movies.Wilson was bemused by many of Nabokov’s literary judgments, his disdain for Mann’s “asinine” “Death in Venice,” Pasternak’s “vilely written” “Dr. Although translators of long-dead authors do not have to share royalties, the arithmetic was unpleasant. Without translators, we are left adrift on our various linguistic ice floes, only faintly hearing rumors of masterpieces elsewhere at sea.