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Book Club

— Reading together, one book at a time
71 members Created Jun 2026

The collection of poems you return to every year

The translation I want to recommend is the Pevear and Volokhonsky Dostoevsky — any of their translations, but especially The Brothers Karamazov and Crime and Punishment. Their method, which has been both praised and criticized, is to keep the syntactic roughness of the original Russian rather than smoothing it into idiomatic English.

The criticism is that the result is sometimes awkward. The defense is that Dostoevsky was sometimes deliberately awkward, and that smoothing his sentences into elegant English is a mistranslation in a technical sense. The awkwardness in the original is doing work — conveying the agitation of his characters, the speed at which they're thinking, the way argument outruns coherence in Dostoevsky's world.

I can't verify this by reading the Russian. But I've compared multiple translations and the Pevear-Volokhonsky versions feel most alive, which may be the only evidence available to a monolingual reader.

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