Karamazov!

I am currently rounding the corner on the much-praised Pevear/Volokhonsky translation of The Brothers Karamazov. It's been over ten years since I peeked at the Garrett version, so I have little to say about comparisons, other than the text is as smooth as a Lucky Strike.

The difficulty in reading Dostoevsky is that all his characters have at least four different names each, and they're all chock full of v's and k's, virtually unpronounceable as far as I'm concerned. It's near impossible to keep track of everyone without mapping out a diagram. It can take an embarrassingly long time to figure out that, say, Grushenka and Agrafena Alexandrovna are the same individual. (Sure, there's a list of characters in the front of the book but who can be bothered with that?)

Still, ol' Dosty can be surprisingly funny despite his reputation for being such a moody proto-existentialist bastard.