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.

Pevear and Volokhonsky made it clear that their work is a collaboration—her Russian, his English—but they work in adjoining offices, alone. “We don’t want to work over short passages together,” Pevear said. “Larissa does an entire draft first. The first draft for ‘The Brothers Karamazov’ took two years, and thankfully we had an N.E.H. grant”—for thirty-six thousand dollars—“which we stretched out.”

“We thought it would last forever!” Larissa said. “We’d never had anything like that kind of money. We moved to France illegally on a tourist visa, and it was finally a policeman who told us that we needed to ‘regularize our situation,’ as he put it.”

Unlike Garnett, who started small and then worked her way up to the big, baggy monsters of Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy, Pevear and Volokhonsky began with the bulkiest and most complex masterpiece imaginable. “The Brothers Karamazov” is, to use Mikhail Bakhtin’s famous term, the most polyphonic of Dostoyevsky’s novels, the one with the most voices, tones, and textures braided into the text. Tolstoy and Chekhov are far clearer, more serene; perhaps, among the main nineteenth-century texts, only Gogol’s “Dead Souls,” with its singular vocabulary and jokes, is as difficult for a translator.

“We thought, if we can do this together, we should start with the book that meant the most to us and had suffered the most from previous translators,” Pevear said. “Dostoyevsky’s marvellous humor had been lost. The Divine Comedy is divine, a religious work, but it’s also funny; there are comic moments. The same with Dostoyevsky, and the comedy comes when you least expect it. Ilyusha is dying. His shoes are outside the room. His father is banging his head against the door. A prestigious German doctor comes from Moscow to treat the boy. The doctor comes out of the room after seeing him and the father asks him if there is any hope. He says, ‘Be pre-pared for an-ny-thing.’ Then, ‘lowering his eyes, he himself prepared to step across the threshold to the carriage.’ Dickens would never have joked at such a moment. He would have jerked all the tears he could have from us.”

“Yes, that’s true,” Larissa said. “Translators too often look for the so-called Russian sensibility, and, lo and behold, they find it: the darkness, the obsessiveness, the mystic genius. All of that is there, of course. But there is also a lightness, a joyful Christian lightness, too. There are deaths, suicide, the death of a child, Ivan goes mad, Mitya goes to prison—and yet the book ends with joy.”

Dostoyevsky’s detractors have faulted him for erratic, even sloppy, prose and what Nabokov, the most famous of the un-fans, calls his “gothic rodomontade.” “Dostoyevsky did write in a hurry,” Pevear said. “He had terrible deadlines to meet. He wrote ‘Crime and Punishment’ and ‘The Gambler’ simultaneously. He knew that if he didn’t finish ‘The Gambler’ on time he would lose the rights to all his future books for the next nine years. That’s when he hired his future wife as a stenographer and dictated it to her. Tolstoy was better paid, and he didn’t even need the money. And yet Dostoyevsky’s roughness, despite the rush and the pressure, was all deliberate. No matter what the deadline, if he didn’t like what he had, he would throw it all out and start again. So this so-called clumsiness is seen in his drafts, the way he works on it. It’s deliberate. His narrator is not him; it’s always a bad provincial writer who has an unpolished quality but is deeply expressive. In the beginning of ‘The Brothers Karamazov,’ in the note to the reader, there is the passage about ‘being at a loss to resolve these questions, I am resolved to leave them without any resolution.’ He stumbles. It’s all over the place.”

“And this is how people speak,” Volokhonsky said. “We mix metaphors, we stumble, we make mistakes.”

“Other translators smooth it out,” Pevear said. “We don’t.”

In his preface, Pevear points out that the narrative voice in the novel is full of hedged assertions, mixed diction, wandering syntax, weirdly incorrect compound modifiers (“Ivan Fyodorovich was convinced beyond doubt of his complete and extremely ill condi- tion”), “fused” clichés (as when he refers to a monk from Obdorsk as “the distant visitor”—combining “visitor from far away” and “distant land”). In order to re-create some sense of the tone of the original, Pevear and Volokhonsky have to rely on their own literary instincts, but they have also devised a set of guidelines. For instance, they will not use an English word that the Oxford English Dictionary says came into use after the publication of the novel they are translating. In the Sidney Monas “Crime and Punishment,” the translator uses “pal” instead of something like “old boy.” “We won’t do that,” Pevear said, making the face of a child who has inadvertently eaten a Brussels sprout.

Also, Volokhonsky said, “Dostoyevsky doesn’t use slang, really, though sometimes there is a vulgarism. For example, he uses profiltrovat’sya—‘to filter through,’ say, into a society—or stushevat’sya, which Dostoyevsky seems to have invented, meaning ‘to efface yourself out.’ ” There are no real obscenities. In “The Demons,” a Holy Fool—a religious idiot savant—curses, but Dostoyevsky uses dashes instead of the word itself. Pevear and Volokhonsky are hardly prudes, but their read-ing tastes have limits. Even when they desperately needed the money, they refused an offer to translate Victor Erofeyev’s fantastically dirty novel, “Russian Beauty.” Nor did they find much to admire in a recent scandalous text from Russia, Vladimir Sorokin’s “Blue Lard.” “It was the only book I ever asked to have removed from my house,” Volokhonsky said. “I said, ‘Take it back, rid me of its presence. We are not amused.’ ”

To compare the Garnett and the Pevear-Volokhonsky translations of “The Brothers Karamazov” is to alight on hundreds of subtle differences in tone, word choice, word order, and rhythm.

“These changes seem small, but they are essential. They accumulate,” Pevear said. “It’s like a musical composition and a musician, an interpretation. If your fingers are too heavy or too light, the piece can be distorted.”

“It can also be compared to restoring a painting,” Volokhonsky said. “You can’t overdo it, but you have to be true to the thing.”

Volokhonsky’s sense of fidelity has obvious roots: she is confounded by any translation that has little sense of the original’s qualities as they play on a Russian ear and sensibility. Pevear’s fidelity to Dostoyevsky’s “sloppiness” comes from a rather grand ambition. “I began as a writer, as a poet, not as a translator, so I started out with that set of problems,” he said. “It seemed to me that English prose had become textureless, flavorless, flat, naïve, a kind of dull first person. ‘I woke up. I saw the window. I felt very bad. The sun was rising over the hills.’ Now, Dostoyevsky writes often in the first person, but there’s a richness of texture and idea and voice. So one subliminal idea I started out with as a translator was to help energize English itself.

“Hemingway read Garnett’s Dostoyevsky and he said it influenced him,” he continued. “But Hemingway was just as influenced by Constance Garnett as he was by Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Garnett breaks things into simple sentences, she Hemingwayizes Dostoyevsky, if you see what I mean.”

The Pevear-Volokhonsky translation of “The Brothers Karamazov” won almost uniformly positive reviews and the PEN prize for translation. “In the Wichita Eagle, we got an amazing full-page review with the headline ‘ “karamazoV” still leads creative way,’ ” Pevear said as we broke for lunch one day. “The only problem is that they used a photograph of Tolstoy.”

Traditionally, translating was part of a Russian writer’s work. Before the nineteenth century, the sum total of great Russian literature—after taking into account a twelfth-century epic, “The Song of Igor’s Campaign,” a few comic playwrights, and some stars of the Westernizing eighteenth century, such as Derzhavin, Radishchev, and Karamzin—was relatively negligible. The upper, reading classes automatically thought of literature as a European import. Some read the works in translation, others in the original. In “Eugene Onegin,” Pushkin provides us with Tatiana Larina’s reading list—“From early on she loved romances, / they were her only food”—and it is all foreign: Richardson, Rousseau, Lovelace, Sophie Cottin, Madame de Staël. And in Chapter 2 of Pushkin’s story “The Queen of Spades” an old countess calls on a young officer, her grandson: