The Brothers Karamazov: Translated by Richard Pevear & Larissa Volokhonsky

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There is something about the rhythm and choice of words that appeal to me, and that helps me understand the characters. The author’s towering reputation as one of the handful of thinkers who forged the modern sensibility has sometimes obscured the purely novelistic virtues—brilliant characterizations, flair for suspense and melodrama, instinctive theatricality—that made his work so immensely popular in nineteenth-century Russia. It’s a good test for any translation, because one of the rhymes is left unfinished—the narrator breaks off halfway through the second line and simply says, “There followed a most unprintable rhyme. 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.

The poor girl had been unable to walk for about six months, and had to be wheeled around in a long Bath-chair on rubber-rimmed wheels. On the other hand, I do retain essential repetitions, those that have semantic importance, such as the heart-rending “lacerations” ( nadryvy), which comprise most of Book Four in the novel.And, as Morson points out in his Commentary article, translations of classic works are even more likely to get raves than the average much-hyped critical darling. I harp on the point that conservative magazines are well placed to dissent from this hype-driven feedback loop because, alas, they usually don’t. Katz — as an achievement comparable in scale and power to Homer’s “ Iliad,” Aeschylus’s “ Oresteia” and Dante’s “ Divine Comedy. Wilson so justly proclaims in the beginning of “The Strange Case of Pushkin and Nabokov,” we are indeed old friends. Heartily recommended to any reader who wishes to come as close to Dostoevsky’s Russian as it is possible.

Their hope was to be true to Dostoyevsky, right down to his famous penchant for repetition, seeming sloppiness, and melodrama.Richard Pevear was living in Manhattan in the mid-nineteen-eighties when he began reading “The Brothers Karamazov.