‘What we have here are bookish dreams, sir, a heart stirred up by theories, a visible determination to take the first step . . .’
I had previously read Crime and Punishment in the translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. They’ve published well-respected translations of other ‘big’ Russian novels like War and Peace and Doctor Zhivago and, while I enjoyed reading Dostoevsky’s novel the first time around, this new translation by Oliver Ready really helped me to fall back in love with it.
Part of the novel’s brilliance lies in its structure. The story is now so well known that it is hard to imagine how impressive Dostoevsky’s ‘delayed decoding’ techniques in the first part of the novel must have been to early readers. We are only given hints and clues about the deed Raskolnikov intends to commit. We travel with him as the crime becomes more concrete in his mind and eventually, almost incredulously, witness him perpetrating it.
Apparently Dostoevsky wrote early drafts of the novel from the first person perspective of Raskolnikov, which would have been a bleak experience to read. However, the finished third person version retains a great deal of claustrophobia and atmosphere. The locations, readily identifiable on the streets of St. Petersburg today, are low-ceilinged, damp and mired in filth. The fact that the book is set during one of St. Petersburg’s notoriously hot and unbearable summers, as well as the compressed time frame of the book, further heightens this sense of humidity, closeness and unease.
At several points during the novel we are invited to criticize the thoughts and actions of the protagonist. This is easily done because there is a great deal to dislike about Raskolnikov. For me, the heart of the novel is Razumikhin, Raskolnikov’s friend. It would be a cold-hearted reader who did not sympathise with his warm generosity of spirit and constant attempts to raise Raskolnikov from his stupor. He gets drunk, dashes from apartment to apartment and struggles to maintain a gentlemanly approach despite his strong feelings for Raskolnikov’s sister. To appropriate words Razumikhin himself uses to describe Raskolnikov, he’s ‘A splendid lad! A splendid lad!’
Literary translators often stumble on the colloquial and idiomatic dialogue of characters. Some readers might remember the early translations of Tolstoy, in which the muzhiks are given awful cockney accents in order to replicate the speech given to them by the author. One of the key differences between the Pevear/Volokhonsky and Ready translations is the way in which Ready brings Razumikhin’s speech to life (the name is derived from the Russian word for ‘reason’, perhaps used with a degree of irony here). Compare, for instance, the passage in which Razumikhin sings the praises of Raskolnikov’s landlady. Here’s the Pevear and Volokhonsky translation:
‘”but Pashenka prevailed. I’d never have suspected she could be such a . . . winsome little thing . . . Eh, brother? What do you think?”
Raskolnikov remained silent, though he never for a moment tore his anxious eyes from him, and now went on stubbornly staring at him.
“Very much so, in fact,” Razumikhin continued, not in the least embarrassed by the silence, and as if agreeing with the answer he had received, “and even quite all right, in all respects.”’
This is Ready’s translation of the same bit:
“’but Pashenka came out on top. I would never have thought, brother, that she was so, well . . . avenante-ish . . . eh? Wouldn’t you say?”
Raskolnikov said nothing, though his troubled gaze did not leave Razumikhin for one second, and now, too, he carried on staring right at him.
“Not half,” Razumikhin went on, quite unembarrassed by the silence, as if he were echoing a reply, “not half, in every department.”’
In the latter translation, we see the easy humour of the character. Indeed, Ready seems to have channeled some of Eric Idle’s ‘nudge-nudge, wink-wink’ patter from the famous Monty Python sketch into the dialogue. The Pevear and Volokhonsky translation just seems a little dry, a little flat. (Admittedly, I haven’t read the novel in the original Russian and I might be barking up the wrong tree here. Who knows, perhaps Dostoevsky’s portrayal of the dialogue was dry and flat in the original? I doubt it, though.)
Ready’s introduction and notes guide the reader through some of the complex contextual features of the novel in a measured and sensible way: particularly interesting is his explanation of some of the medical terms which are used to describe Raskolnikov’s condition at various points in the book. I was also unaware of the etymology of the Russian word for crime which literally means to ‘step over’ a boundary. It’s similar to our own word ‘transgression.’ Ready retains Dostoevsky’s constant repetition of the word ‘step’ throughout the novel, thereby allowing us to see the way in which this theme develops throughout the story.
It’s a wonderful, gripping and moving book. The humour which Ready’s translation does so well to highlight also heightens the tension and underlines they key themes of the text. I’d heartily recommend this new translation: check it out.
