Dostoevsky & His Translators

Преступление и наказание (1866) / Crime and Punishment is a novel by the Russian author Fyodor Dostoevsky. It was first published in the literary journal The Russian Messenger (Русский Вестник) in twelve monthly installments during 1866. It was later published in a single volume in 1867

CRIME & PUNISHMENT first French edition (1884), from which the first English edition was translated (and also the first Spanish edition was translated). Please see http://www.jarndyce.co.uk/index.php

Crime & Punishment in English Translation

Frederick Whishaw (1885)
Constance Garnett (1914)
David Magarshack (1951)
Princess Alexandra Kropotkin (1953)
Jessie Coulson (1953)
Michael Scammell (1963)
Sidney Monas (1968)
Julius Katzer (1985)
David McDuff (1991)
Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (1992)
Oliver Ready (2014)
Sara Young (2017)

 Celebrating David Magarshack

a UCL Alumni

A sketch of David Magarshack, by an artist friend of the family did of him while he was hard at work (date around 29 February 1948) Copyrights are owned by the Magarshack family, Courtesy of Emily Morris and Cathy McAteer

David Magarshack was born in Riga, then Russia, in 1899. He was educated at a Russian secondary school, and emigrated to England in 1920 in the hope of pursuing a higher education. He attended an evening course in English Language and Literature at University College London and graduated with a 2:1 four years later on 22 October 1924. On graduation, he worked as a journalist at Fleet Street and became a British citizen in 1931. He was commissioned to translate Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment for Penguin in 1949, heralding the start of a fifteen-year relationship with Penguin Classics and resulting in seven publications with them in total. In addition to his translation work, Magarshack also made his name as a biographer, publishing works on the lives of Stanislavsky, Chekhov, Turgenev, Gogol, Dostoevsky, and Pushkin. He died in London on Wednesday 26 October 1977. David Magarshack in his later years Copyrights are owned by the Magarshack family, Courtesy of Emily Morris and Cathy McAteer

David Magarshack

” David Magarshack’s translation of Crime and Punishment remains the best in English. I remember the version I first read decades ago as a boy had a red cover – seeing the red cover online prompted me to order it hoping it was the same version. It was and it reads just as lucidly as 30 years ago – a timeless masterpiece.” Review by Frank Zayn

David Magarshack (23 December 1899 – 26 October 1977) was a British translator and biographer of Russian authors, best known for his translations of Dostoevsky. Magarshack was born in Riga, in present-day Latvia (Riga was then part of Russia), travelled to Britain in 1920 and became naturalised in 1931. After graduating from University College London in English Language and Literature, he worked in Fleet Street and published a number of novels. He was the biographer of Anton Chekhov (1952, 1955 (US)), Nikolai Gogol (1957), Dostoevsky (1962), Alexander Pushkin (1967), Konstantin Stanislavski (1950, 1976) and Ivan Turgenev (1954). Magarshack died in London in 1977.

ABOUT THE BEST SHORT STORIES OF FYODOR DOSTOEVSKY

This collection, unique to the Modern Library, gathers seven of Dostoevsky’s key works and shows him to be equally adept at the short story as with the novel. Exploring many of the same themes as in his longer works, these small masterpieces move from the tender and romantic White Nights, an archetypal nineteenth-century morality tale of pathos and loss, to the famous Notes from the Underground, a story of guilt, ineffectiveness, and uncompromising cynicism, and the first major work of existential literature. Among Dostoevsky’s prototypical characters is Yemelyan in The Honest Thief, whose tragedy turns on an inability to resist crime. Presented in chronological order, in David Magarshack’s celebrated translation, this is the definitive edition of Dostoevsky’s best stories.