The Bright Book of Life by Harold Bloom

HAVE WRITTEN about Dostoevsky's final and greatest work before, but I no longer agree with my earlier critique. My father refused to speak Russian after he left Odessa, and I grew up speaking only Yiddish. I studied other languages at Cornell and Yale, and since then, during my teaching years, I have mastered others. It is one of my regrets that I never learned Russian. That means my reading of Pushkin, Gogol, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Turgenev, Goncharov, Lermontov, Dostoevsky, and the other classic authors of nineteenth-century Russia has been enslaved to translations. The earlier ones by Constance Garnett that I read in my youth were a heroic enterprise yet stilted in diction and, I gather, inaccurate and particularly poor in conveying tone.

However, since 1990, the remarkable married team of Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky have translated many of the Russian classics into persuasive English versions, and I am among their thousands of grateful debtors. Several rereadings of their The Brothers Karamazov have not made me love that overpowering novel, but I begin to understand it better, and to clarify my ambivalences concerning Dostoevsky.