Their opinion can usually be traced back to a press release—but then, that’s why good publicity hacks get paid such good money.

I have just arrived and have come to thank you for that pound of nuts, for no one else ever bought me a pound of nuts; you are the only one that ever did. It seems to me that the Russian ear is much more tolerant of repeated words and phrases than the Anglo-American ear.Of course you can read the Garnett translation on Project Gutenberg, or as a cheap ebook, though her translations aren’t thought to be that great, and it’s missing the “note from the author” for some reason. A patient confidant of his long and hopeless infatuation with the Russian language, I have always done my best to explain to him his mistakes of pronunciation, grammar, and interpretation. The majority of pages are undamaged with some creasing or tearing, and pencil underlining of text, but this is minimal. So he commissions (or greenlights) a more positive review—if he can get a big-name author like Adam Gopnik , so much the better—and the effect on the work’s reputation is a wash.

We moved to France illegally on a tourist visa, and it was finally a policeman who told us that we needed to ‘regularize our situation,’ as he put it. Nobody can deny that “The Brothers Karamazov” can be prolix and repetitive, partly because it initially appeared over the course of two years as a magazine serial. Put simply, Avsey’s and MacAndrew’s languages make the text more direct and lands in my mind in another way that the other translator’s texts do. In “Lectures on Russian Literature,” there is a facsimile of the opening pages of his teaching copy of the Garnett “Anna Karenina.In translating slushat’ shum morskoy (Eight:IV:11) I chose the archaic and poetic transitive turn “to listen the sound of the sea” because the relevant passage has in Pushkin a stylized archaic tone. Similarly, his favorite adjective is “strange”: when he says something is strange, it is out of this world, beyond the range of common experience. Nabokov could not bear Arndt’s “Germanisms,” his freewheeling sacrifice of semantic accuracy for rhythmic “beauty. Although translators of long-dead authors do not have to share royalties, the arithmetic was unpleasant. We learn that Fyodor may have fathered an illegitimate son, named Smerdyakov, who is now his unctuously obedient servant; that Grushenka was sexually abused by a much older man when she was just 17; and that Katerina planned to sacrifice her virtue to save her father from financial disgrace.