Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky Read Free Book Online Page A

in order to render the conflict of personages naked and exemplary; the law of composition is one of maximum energy, released over the smallest possible extent of space and time’ (
Tolstoy or Dostoevsky
). These comments are especially pertinent to the constricted setting and style of
Crime and Punishment
, where Dostoyevsky largely eschews the verbosity that is a feature and a concern of several of his earlier, and later, works. In fact, the narrative passages are notable for the narrowness of their lexical range, using verbal repetition to help evoke the psychological experience of Raskolnikov, who repeats actions almost as often as he repeats words. Lexical and thematic clusters – to do with memory or family relations or time – prove inseparable. Sometimes, idiomatic English has to be forced a little to capture these repetitions; on other occasions a single Russian word gains an accretion of reference that can be recovered in English only in part – by compensating for its untranslatability elsewhere. A salient example is the noun
delo
( ‘deed’, ‘action’, ‘criminal case’, ‘matter’, ‘thing’, ‘business’), which is repeated so often, and in so many contexts, that it comes to mimic the great obsession of Dostoyevsky’s time, and of Raskolnikov himself: when will words finally become deeds?
    Another aspect of the ‘maximum energy’ mentioned by Steiner has to do with the vitality and variety of the spoken word in Dostoyevsky’s fiction. The characters of
Crime and Punishment
are defined by their language, irony and humour. To recapture their speech patterns – especially those of Porfiry Petrovich, the detective – a considerably greater licence seemed appropriate than in the compressed passages of pure narrative. Dostoyevsky’s characters would, furthermore, have sounded very modern to his readers, except where they consciously invest their speech with archaism (to recall, in many cases, the fading Russia of fixed social hierarchies). The narrator’s language would also have sounded fresh and alive. To replicate this vividness, while reserving scope for archaism elsewhere, I have aimed for an idiom that still sounds modern today, but is not exclusively of our time.
    A related point is the translation of biblical language. Part Four of
Crime and Punishment
contains extensive extracts and quotations from the Gospels. For these, I have used the mid-twentieth-century Revised Standard Version, to reflect the fact that the Russian translation cited in the novel sounded (and still sounds) modern, in stark contrast to the much older translation done into Old Church Slavonic, strong traces of which can be heard, for example, in Part One, Chapter II , where, correspondingly, I have used the seventeenth-century King James Version.
    NOTE ON THE TEXT
    This translation is based on the text found in F. M. Dostoyevsky,
Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v tridtsati tomakh
(Leningrad: Nauka, 1972–90 ), vol. 6 ( 1973 ). Since this celebrated edition, a further Collected Works, which claims to adhere more closely to Dostoyevsky’s own preferences for the visual appearance of his text and markers of emphasis, has been published in Moscow (Voskresenye, 2003–5 ). The differences between the editions have mainly to do with punctuation (modernized to some degree in this translation), and for most scholars of Dostoyevsky the authority of the Soviet ‘Academy’ edition remains unsurpassed.
    ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
    As the first new translator of
Crime and Punishment
in a generation, I have had the good fortune of benefiting not only from the experience of my predecessors, recent and distant, but also from the copious scholarship that has appeared in the intervening period, both in the digital wonderland and in more traditional formats (notably, Boris Tikhomirov’s Russian commentary on the novel, listed in Further