The text of this atlas
Constance Garnett
1912 · Heinemann
- Keeps
- Gravity. Her measured Victorian English suits the elder’s teaching and the narrator’s long periods, and for decades it was the Dostoyevsky English-speaking readers knew.
- Costs
- Dostoyevsky’s roughness. She smooths his repetitions, hesitations and deliberately clumsy phrasing, and the voices sound more alike than they do in Russian. There are also slips and small omissions; later editors corrected many of them.
- For
- Readers who want the classic English Dostoyevsky, or the text this atlas quotes. The Norton Critical Edition prints her translation revised by Ralph Matlaw (1976), and later by Susan McReynolds Oddo (2011).
1990 · North Point Press
Richard Pevear & Larissa Volokhonsky
- Keeps
- The Russian. Readers’ consensus is that it is the closest in cadence and structure: the repetitions, the verbal tics, the narrator’s fussiness, each character’s own way of talking.
- Costs
- Ease. Keeping the Russian shape sometimes makes for awkward English, and its critics argue it reads as translated.
- For
- Readers who want to hear how Dostoyevsky sounds, and do not mind the effort.
1993 · Penguin Classics
David McDuff
- Keeps
- Pace. Readers describe it as leaner and faster than the older translations, in plain modern English.
- Costs
- Some of the texture both Garnett and Pevear & Volokhonsky, in their different ways, preserve.
- For
- Often recommended for a first reading.
1994 · Oxford World’s Classics
Ignat Avsey
- Keeps
- Life in the dialogue. Fluent modern English in which the arguments crackle; readers who find it call it the most underrated.
- Costs
- Fluency is a choice: the smoother the English, the less of Dostoyevsky’s deliberate awkwardness survives.
- For
- Readers who stall on stiff prose and want the conversations to move.
2023 · Liveright
Michael R. Katz
- Keeps
- A contemporary scholar’s reading, the newest of the five.
- Costs
- Too new for the long record of readers’ reports the others have; judge a chapter for yourself.
- For
- Readers who want the most recent translation.