Crime and Punishment: A New Translation

by Fyodor Dostoevsky, Michael R. Katz (Translator)

Overview

A celebrated new translation of Dostoevsky’s masterpiece reveals the “social problems facing our own society” (Nation).

Published to great acclaim and fierce controversy in 1866, Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment has left an indelible mark on global literature and on our modern world. Declared a PBS “Great American Read,” Michael Katz’s sparkling new translation gives new life to the story of Raskolnikov, an impoverished student who sees himself as extraordinary and therefore free to commit crimes—even murder—in a work that best embodies the existential dilemmas of man’s instinctual will to power. Embracing the complex linguistic blend inherent in modern literary Russian, Katz “revives the intensity Dostoevsky’s first readers experienced, and proves that Crime and Punishment still has the power to surprise and enthrall us” (Susan Reynolds).

With its searing and unique portrayal of the labyrinthine universe of nineteenth-century St. Petersburg, this “rare Dostoevsky translation” (William Mills Todd III, Harvard) will captivate lovers of world literature for years to come.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781631495311
Publisher:	Liveright Publishing Corporation
Publication date:	01/15/2019
Edition description:	Translatio
Pages:	624
Sales rank:	49,520
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.50(d)

About the Author

Fyodor Dostoevsky wrote The Brothers Karamazov, Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, and many other novels.

Michael R. Katz is C. V. Starr Professor Emeritus of Russian and East European Studies at Middlebury College. He has published translations of more than fifteen Russian novels, including Crime and Punishment and Notes from Underground. He lives in Cornwall, Vermont.

Editorial Reviews

"Mesmerizingly good…the best, truest translation of Dostoevsky’s masterpiece into English. It’s a magnificent, almost terrifying achievement of translation, one that makes its predecessors, however worthy, seem safe and polite."

Open Letters Monthly - Steve Donoghue

"These are the voices of Crime and Punishment, in all their original, dazzling variety: pensive, urgent, defiant, and triumphant. This new translation by Michael Katz revives the intensity Dostoevsky’s first readers experienced, and proves that Crime and Punishment still has the power to surprise and enthrall us."

Susan McReynolds

"A rare Dostoevsky translation…a major contribution to the dissemination and understanding of the Russian novel."

William Mills Todd III

A rare Dostoevsky translation...a major contribution to the dissemination and understanding of the Russian novel.--William Mills Todd III, Harvard University

From the Publisher

2017-09-03
" ‘I don't need any…translations,' muttered Raskolnikov." Well, of course he does, hence this new translation of an old standby of Russian-lit survey courses.Driven to desperation, a morally sketchy young man kills and kills again. He gets away with it—at least for a while, until a psychologically astute cop lays a subtle trap. Throw in a woman friend who hints from the sidelines that he might just feel better confessing, and you have—well, maybe not Hercule Poirot or Kurt Wallender, but at least pretty familiar ground for an episode of a PBS series or Criminal Minds. The bare bones of that story, of course, are those of Crime and Punishment, published in 1866, when Dostoyevsky was well on the road from young democrat to middle-aged reactionary: thus the importance of confession, nursed along by the naughty lady of the night with the heart of gold, and thus Dostoyevsky's digs at liberal-inclined intellectuals ("That's what they're like these writers, literary men, students, loudmouths…Damn them!") and at those who would point to crimes great and small and say that society made them do it. So Rodion Raskolnikov, who does a nasty pawnbroker, "a small, dried-up miserable old woman, about sixty years old, with piercing, malicious little eyes, a small sharp nose, and her bare head," in with an ax, then takes it to her sister for good measure. It's to translator Katz's credit that he gives the murder a satisfyingly grotty edge, with blood spurting and eyes popping and the like. Much of the book reads smoothly, though too often with that veneer of translator-ese that seems to overlie Russian texts more than any other; Katz's version sometimes seems to slip into Constance Garnett-like fustiness, as when, for instance, Raskolnikov calls Svidrigaylov "a crude villain...voluptuous debaucher and scoundrel." It's not quite idiomatic—for that there's Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky's version—but the translation moves easily and legibly enough through Raskolnikov's nasty deeds, game of cat and mouse, and visionary redemption.

Kirkus Reviews