Raskolnikov stands outside the pawnbroker's door, an ax inside his coat. In a moment he will put his theory -- that great men are exempt from morality -- into practice by bringing that ax down on the head of the old woman. As he is about to ring her doorbell, Raskolnikov thinks, in Mr. Pevear and Ms. Volokhonsky's translation: "Am I not pale . . . too pale?" "Am I not pale" is simply not the language of thought. Mr. McDuff's version has the ease of the natural: "Don't I look terribly . . . pale?" Constance Garnett's rendering early in this century was the simplest of all: "Am I very pale?"

Later on, Raskolnikov is revolted by his crime, though more by its banality than its criminality. In one of those self-lacerating torrents of consciousness that are a Dostoyevsky specialty, Raskolnikov exclaims: "Oh, the vulgarity of it! Oh, the baseness!" -- if we are to believe Mr. McDuff -- or "Oh, triteness! Oh, meanness!" if we are to credit Mr. Pevear and Ms. Volokhonsky. I cannot imagine a Russian murderer thinking: "Oh, triteness! Oh, meanness!" I cannot imagine anyone thinking it, for that matter. This sort of rendering betrays a lack of skill, ear and editor.

The word the translators have rendered as either "vulgarity" or "triteness" is "poshlost" in Russian, a word so rich that Vladimir Nabokov devoted 12 pages to it in his 155-page biography of Nikolai Gogol. In essence, "poshlost" denotes spiritual tackiness; it pains Raskolnikov more that he has proved to be mediocre, banal, even vulgar, than that he has taken life. Mr. McDuff's "Oh, the vulgarity of it! Oh, the baseness!" is certainly better than the Pevear-Volokhonsky version, but the two "Ohs" and the word "baseness" lend the line too antique a coloration.

Oddly enough, Garnett, translating in an era when "Ohs," one assumes, seemed less dated, chooses a different syntax entirely, one that is itself exclamation without first signaling that it is such. She says: "The vulgarity! The abjectness!" This also has the value of being concise. The other word Dostoyevsky used, engaging in a little alliteration, was "podlost," a more common word than "abjectness" ever was. This is one instance in which the problem has yet to be excellently resolved.

Words not only have meanings, but also histories of their own. Since 1866, when "Crime and Punishment" was published, some words have had fabulous careers and none more so than "glasnost." Though I knew the word had a long lineage, I was still startled to find it in "Crime and Punishment," where Dostoyevsky used it to refer to a historical phase already past. Garnett could not know the luster and connotation that the word "glasnost" would attain by now; she simply has Svidrigailov say "a few years ago, in those days of beneficent publicity. . . ." This is a version that has only lost meaning with time, as "publicity" has acquired shades that connect it more closely with "poshlost" than with making things public knowledge.