Penguins on Parade: Crime and Punishment – Deluxe!

Some Penguin Classics, as we noted last time, come along as almost indisputable improvements on what’s come before (‘almost’ because there’ll always be a few token refusniks in any crowd, don’t you know), and in the case of the last item in our Week of Penguins,  the new Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition of Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, this is doubly true.

First and most strikingly, there’s the physical appearance of the thing. In its history with Penguin Classics, Crime and Punishment has had, it must be admitted, some gawd-awful cover choices. This is a dense 500-page Russian novel about doubt and doubtful redemption … the very last thing it needs, in any popular reprint series, is a boring or off-putting cover. So some of those earlier Penguin choices – an entirely static out-of-focus black-and-white photograph of a street, or the ever-popular some guy in a hat – well, they weren’t exactly inviting.

That problem has been dramatically solved in this new Deluxe edition (which also has the advantage of feeling very sturdy in the hand – this is a Crime and Punishment truly built for the briefcase and backpack), which features a vibrant, eye-catching wraparound cover by popular illustrator Zohar Lazar. The back cover is a pathetic St. Petersburg street scene complete with plenty of word balloons (the heavy influence of the great Will Eisner in his “Contract with God” phase is evident in every brush-stroke). Front and center on that cover we see the novel’s hapless protagonist, Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikov, the pockets of his ratty coat bulging with stolen baubles, his hand gripping a bloody axe, and his panic-stricken eyes staring down into his own twisted reflection in a spreading pool of blood. In the grand new tradition of the Deluxe Classics, the staid quality of earlier covers has been abandoned in favor of a first impression that agrees with Virginia Woolf about this novel: “Against our wills we are drawn in, whirled round, blinded, suffocated, and at the same time filled with a giddy rapture.”

The second strength of this new edition is, thankfully, the translation itself. The earlier Penguin version was by David McDuff and could at times succumb to the kind of bloat our new translator, Oliver Ready, rightly notes as a cardinal sin of Dostoevsky translators. Ready then proceeds, in his Introduction, to raise the specter of mind-numbing academic tedium with this frankly terrifying call-and-response:

The troublesome question ‘Why retranslate the classics?’ has perhaps only one satisfactory answer: because the translator hopes to offer a closer approximation to his or her experience of the original than is otherwise available.

Happily, this is the only Casaubon-like note Ready strikes. His short but intensely interesting Introduction characterizes Raskolnikov as “an inveterate literary critic” and casts a great deal of the action surrounding him in intriguingly literary terms:

Raskolnikov has blood on his socks and ink on his fingers. He prepares for his crime not only by extensive reading, but also, we later learn, by attempting his first literary debut – a scholarly article with the same theme as the drama in which he plays the starring role. Published without his knowledge, this article is shown to him much later by his proud mother, whereupon, despite the grotesque incongruity with his current situation, he experiences ‘that strange and caustically sweet sensation which every author feels on seeing himself published for the first time, especially at only twenty-three years of age.’

And his translation itself is nothing less than a wonder. He mirrors the tonal shifts in Dostoevsky’s original more nimbly than any English-language translator has before, and he catches the dark humor that runs through the book mostly below its surface, and best of all, he captures the essential, unchanging absurdity of Raskolnikov perfectly, especially in the many key, priceless scenes of confrontation between him and the deceptively mild detective Porfiry Petrovich, including the first such encounter, when Raskolnikov is nattering on about how he has items on offer in the shop of a murdered old pawnbroker (a murder he himself has committed, both before and after interminable soul-searching) and doesn’t want that forgotten in the event of a sale, because he’s a trifle short of funds:

‘You see, for the moment all I wish to do is declare that the items are mine, and when the money comes in …’

‘Makes no odds, sir,’ replied Porfiry Petrovich, unmoved by this clarification about the state of his finances, ‘but if you prefer you may write directly to me to the same effect, namely, that being apprised of such-and-such and declaring items such-and-such to be mine, I request …’

‘Ordinary paper will do, I take it?’ Raskolnikov hastened to interrupt, expressing his interest once again in the financial side of the matter.

‘Oh, as ordinary as you like, sir!’ – and Porfiry Petrovich suddenly looked at him with a sort of blatant mockery, narrowing his eyes and even winking at him. Or perhaps this was just Raskolnikov’s impression, for it lasted no more than an instant. In any case, something of the sort occurred. Raskolnikov could have sworn he winked at him, the devil only knew why.

‘He knows!’ flashed through him like lightning.

Crime and Punishment is rife with such teetering, electric moments – Virginia Woolf was, as always, right – but I confess, I hadn’t see that fact while slogging through previous translations (including the version from my beloved Constance Garnett, here clearly out of her psychological depth and producing a work of such murk that while reading it for the first time, a literary friend of mine quipped, “The ‘punishment’ part is coming through loud and clear”). Ready’s version crackles with grubby, demented vitality – I’m hoping it, and this lovingly twisted Deluxe edition – enjoys a long life as the go-to edition in English.