Notes from underground (3)

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The awkward aspect of reviewing translated books is that if you need to read it in translation you can't know how closely a given version adheres to the original. So, I've alway

s used a fairly simple standard: good translations are those that render a book readable and enjoyable, whether it was or not in its own language. Of course, even this standard is not infallible, because a translation that was colloquial a hundred years ago may seem antiquated and obscure now. In my experience, it seems that the great Russian novels have always made for some tough sledding, perhaps because nearly every one we had available until a few years ago was translated by Constance Garnett, raising the possibility that her work had become dated. At any rate, in recent years the team of Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky has undertaken a series of widely acclaimed new translations of works by Tolstoy, Gogol and Dostoevsky. Though no more capable of determining whether they capture the original, I can say they've made the Russian masters comprehensible.

Notes from Underground was originally published in two installments in the January and February 1864 issues of The Epoch. Where Crime and Punishment has always bothered me because Dostoevsky left the redemptive message of the book a seeming afterthought, here he inverts his story so that the biographical notes of his Underground Man appear in the second part, while the lessons life has taught him appear in the first. As Mr. Pevear's enormously helpful Introduction explains, those lessons are Dostoevsky's answer to a book that was well-known and enormously influential in his time, but unread in ours: What is to Be Done? by N. G. Chernyshevsky. An advocate of "rational egoism" and utilitarianism: