A less imperious but no less discerning critic, Kornei Chukovsky (who was also a famous writer of children’s books), esteemed Garnett for her work on Turgenev and Chekhov but not for her Dostoyevsky. The famous style of “convulsions” and “nervous trembling,” he wrote, becomes under Garnett’s pen “a safe blandscript: not a volcano, but a smooth lawn mowed in the English manner—which is to say a complete distortion of the original.”

Garnett (1862-1946) was one of eight children. Her father was paralyzed, and when Constance was just fourteen her mother died of a heart attack from the exertion of hoisting her husband from chair to bed. Constance won a scholarship to read classics at Newnham College, Cambridge, and after graduation she married a publisher, Edward Garnett, the scion of a family of English literary aristocrats.

When the Garnetts were setting up housekeeping, Edward began to invite various Russian exiles as weekend guests. Constance was entranced by their stories of revolutionary fervor and literary ferment. In 1891, when she was confined with a difficult pregnancy, she began to learn Russian. Soon, she tried her hand at translating minor pieces, beginning with Goncharov’s “A Common Story” and Tolstoy’s “The Kingdom of God Is Within You” and then moving on to her favorite of the Russians, Turgenev. In 1894, she left behind her infant son and her husband and made a three-month trip to Russia, where she drove long distances through snowstorms by sleigh, visited experimental schools, and dined with Tolstoy at his estate.

When Garnett returned to England, she began an ascetic lifelong routine of housekeeping, child-rearing, and translating. Mornings, she made porridge for her son David, and then, according to her biographer Carolyn Heilbrun, “she would go round the garden, while the dew was still on the plants, to kill the slugs; this was a moment of selfindulgence.” Garnett was a sickly woman, suffering from migraines, sciatica, and terrible eyesight, and yet her ailments did not deter her from working as a translator. She turned down an offer from Tolstoy’s close friends Louise and Aylmer Maude to collaborate on a translation of “War and Peace” and did it on her own. (So, too, did the Maudes, her only rival in Tolstoy.) Garnett went nearly blind working on “War and Peace.” She hired a secretary, who read the Russian text to her aloud; Garnett would dictate back in English, sometimes grabbing away the original text and holding it a few inches from her ailing eyes.

Hemingway recalls telling a friend, a young poet named Evan Shipman, that he could never get through “War and Peace”—not “until I got the Constance Garnett translation.” Shipman replied, “They say it can be improved on. I’m sure it can, although I don’t know Russian.”

Richard Pevear was living in Manhattan in the mid-nineteen-eighties when he began reading “The Brothers Karamazov.” He and his wife, a Russian émigrée named Larissa Volokhonsky, had an apartment on the fourth floor of a brownstone on West 107th Street. To earn money, Pevear built custom furniture and cabinets for the emerging executive class in the neighborhood. He had always earned just enough to get by: in New Hampshire, he cut roses in a commercial greenhouse; he worked in a boatyard repairing yachts. He’d published verse in The Hudson Review and other quarterlies, and he’d worked on translations from the languages he knew: French, Italian, Spanish. He’d translated poems by Yves Bonnefoy and Apollinaire, and a philosophical work called “The Gods,” by Alain, a teacher of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone Weil.

Larissa was born in Leningrad; her brother Henri is a poet who was a rival of Brodsky. While Larissa was still living in Russia, she learned English, sat in on a translation seminar, and, using a smuggled copy of The New Yorker, translated a story by John Updike. After she emigrated, in 1973, she translated “Introduction to Patristic Theology,” by John Meyendorff, a Russian Orthodox priest and thinker.

One day, when Richard was reading “Karamazov” (in a translation by one of Garnett’s epigones, David Magarshak), Larissa, who had read the book many times in the original, began peeking over her husband’s shoulder to read along with him. She was outraged. It’s not there! she thought. He doesn’t have it! He’s an entirely different writer!

As an experiment, a lark, Pevear and Volokhonsky decided to collaborate on their own “Karamazov.” After looking at the various translations—Magarshak, Andrew MacAndrew, and, of course, Constance Garnett—they worked on three sample chapters. Their division of labor was—and remains—nearly absolute: First, Larissa wrote out a kind of hyperaccurate trot of the original, complete with interstitial notes about Dostoyevsky’s diction, syntax, and references. Then, Richard, who has never mastered conversational Russian, wrote a smoother, more Englished text, constantly consulting Larissa about the original and the possibilities that it did and did not allow. They went back and forth like this several times, including a final session in which Richard read his English version aloud while Larissa followed along in the Russian. Their hope was to be true to Dostoyevsky, right down to his famous penchant for repetition, seeming sloppiness, and melodrama.

When they had a text they liked, they sent a copy to an editor at Random House. It came back with a brief letter that said, in Richard’s reading, “No, thanks. Garnett lives forever. Why do we need a new one?” Then they tried Oxford University Press. The editors there sent the text along to an Oxford don, who objected to Alyosha Karamazov being called an “angel”; in the margin he wrote instead “good chap”; another marginal note said, simply, “balls.” Oxford University Press turned them down. They did not despair. Pevear and Volokhonsky had in the meantime armed themselves with enthusiastic letters of endorsement from some of the country’s best Slavic scholars—including Victor Terras, at Brown; Robert Louis Jackson, at Yale; Robert Belknap, from Columbia; and Joseph Frank, Dostoyevsky’s supreme biographer, from Stanford—and sent the manuscript out to Holt, Harcourt Brace, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, and a couple of others. There was only one bite: Jack Shoemaker, from North Point Press, a small house in San Francisco (now defunct), called, offering an advance of a thousand dollars—roughly a dollar per page. They estimated that the translation would take five to six years—more than twice as long as it took Dostoyevsky to write the novel. Although translators of long-dead authors do not have to share royalties, the arithmetic was unpleasant. Pevear called back and shyly asked if, perhaps, North Point could come up with a bit more money. Shoemaker offered six thousand. “P/V,” as they would come to be known in the academic journals, went to work on “The Brothers Karamazov.” In time, they would become the best-selling and perhaps the most authoritative translators of Russian prose since Constance Garnett.

A few months ago, I visited Pevear and Volokhonsky in Paris. They moved to France in 1988, convinced that France would be cheaper than the Upper West Side. They live in a small ground-floor apartment on a side street called Villa Poirier. They are both in their early sixties and have two grown children. Pevear is a mild, friendly man with a gray goatee and the sort of untraceable accent that comes off a little high-end. Volokhonsky is earthier, more reserved than her husband, though hardly retiring. Sometimes Pevear would barge uninvited into his wife’s sentences, but she did not easily relent. The rooms are spare and light, and reminded me of apartments I had visited in many Russian cities, apartments of a particular intellectual variety, with the entranceway lined with bookshelves and volumes in Russian, English, French, and other languages. Russian intellectuals always seem to display pictures not only of the family but also of their cultural icons; Larissa kept photographs above her desk of John Meyendorff and another venerable Orthodox thinker, Alexander Schmemann.