Translated by Constance Garnett, Introduction by Ernest J. Simmons
Crime and Punishment
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Book Description
Frequently Bought Together
Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
Dostoyevski's classic novel of murder and guilt, featuring the conflicted killer Raskolnikov and his intellectually nimble antagonist Porfiry Petrovich, is read by the well-regarded Dick Hill. The combination should make for a must-listen audiobook, but the results are disappointingly plodding. Hill overemotes much of Dostoyevski's emotionally charged dialogue, rendering a delicate series of encounters as an array of outbursts and breakdowns. Listeners might find themselves wishing that Hill would restrain himself from the pitfalls of facile emotion in favor of a straight delivery of the inherent drama and descriptive splendor of the novel In a welcome technological twist, however, Tantor includes an e-book with this audiobook (as it does with most of its classic audiobooks), giving readers multiple options for how they might prefer to encounter Dostoyevski. (Sept.)
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Audio CD edition.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Audio CD edition.
Review
The best [translation of Crime and Punishment] currently available...An especially faithful re-creation...with a coiled-spring kinetic energy...Don t miss it. Washington Post Book World
This fresh, new translation...provides a more exact, idiomatic, and contemporary rendition of the novel that brings Fyodor Dostoevsky s tale achingly alive...It succeeds beautifully. San Francisco Chronicle
Reaches as close to Dostoevsky s Russian as is possible in English...The original s force and frightening immediacy is captured...The Pevear and Volokhonsky translation will become the standard English version. Chicago Tribune --Chicago Tribune
This fresh, new translation...provides a more exact, idiomatic, and contemporary rendition of the novel that brings Fyodor Dostoevsky s tale achingly alive...It succeeds beautifully. San Francisco Chronicle
Reaches as close to Dostoevsky s Russian as is possible in English...The original s force and frightening immediacy is captured...The Pevear and Volokhonsky translation will become the standard English version. Chicago Tribune --Chicago Tribune
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
483 of 499 people found the following review helpful
Crime and Punishment is one great novel. However, we have a bit of misleading marketing going on here. Make sure you're buying the version you think you're buying before you order. "Crime and Punishment" published by General Books LLC is a poor quality scanned in version. If you do the "Look Inside" thing on this book, you'll see the inside of another version of the book, NOT the one you will receive.
To give you a few quotes from the publishers website: "We created your book using OCR software ..... with up to 3,500 characters per page, even one percent can be an annoying number of typos.... After we re-typeset ... your book, the page numbers change so the old index and table of contents no longer work .... we usually remove them. .... Our OCR software can't distinguish between an illustration and a smudge or library stamp so it ignores everything except type. ..... We created your book using a robot who turned and photographed each page. Our robot is 99 percent accurate. But sometimes two pages stick together. And sometimes a page may even be missing from our copy of the book. .....". There's no manual editing whatsover.
You get the general idea. Unfortunately, books published by General Books LLC are named, seemingly intentionally, so that they have reviews associated with much better quality imprints. General Books LLC is an imprint of VDM Published (google them on Wikipedia), which is flooding Amazon with poor quality reprints and, unfortunately, many of them have the reviews associated with the original or with beter quality imprints associated with them.
Seems like it's Caveat Emptor on Amazon these days as Amazon certainly doesn't seem to be doing anything to protect it's customers from this Publisher.
To give you a few quotes from the publishers website: "We created your book using OCR software ..... with up to 3,500 characters per page, even one percent can be an annoying number of typos.... After we re-typeset ... your book, the page numbers change so the old index and table of contents no longer work .... we usually remove them. .... Our OCR software can't distinguish between an illustration and a smudge or library stamp so it ignores everything except type. ..... We created your book using a robot who turned and photographed each page. Our robot is 99 percent accurate. But sometimes two pages stick together. And sometimes a page may even be missing from our copy of the book. .....". There's no manual editing whatsover.
You get the general idea. Unfortunately, books published by General Books LLC are named, seemingly intentionally, so that they have reviews associated with much better quality imprints. General Books LLC is an imprint of VDM Published (google them on Wikipedia), which is flooding Amazon with poor quality reprints and, unfortunately, many of them have the reviews associated with the original or with beter quality imprints associated with them.
Seems like it's Caveat Emptor on Amazon these days as Amazon certainly doesn't seem to be doing anything to protect it's customers from this Publisher.
137 of 140 people found the following review helpful
Format:Kindle Edition
This is not the version of the book I clicked on! When you look at the (paperback) edition of Crime and Punishment translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, it says right below it, "Start reading Crime and Punishment on your Kindle..." and also lists the different versions available - paperback, hardcover, etc. - and includes a Kindle Edition. But when you click on either, you get this, which is a completely different translation. Pevear and Volokhonsky have been widely praised, their translations now considered far and away the best English versions available of various classic works of Russian Literature. But Amazon lumps everything with the same title as if it were the same product. Some of the customer-uploaded images of the book's cover even say that it is the Pevear and Volokhonsky version, but it is not. It's a 1914 translation by Constance Garnett.
This is the reason people started to hate big box and online bookstores when they first started putting neighborhood bookstores out of business -- because they don't seem to care about books, just making money. But what's funny here is that they could actually charge money for the better translation, since it's new, but instead they choose to give away an inferior version and pretend it's the same thing. (They do offer the Pevear and Volokhonsky version of Demons for a price - a version easier to distinguish because the newer translation even changes the title from the less-accurate The Possessed - versions with that title are available for free.) Also, because they don't distinguish between different translations, there is no button available under the Pevear and Volokhonsky version to request that the publisher make it available for Kindle.
It's also difficult to know what version of a book is being reviewed sometimes. I'll be reading reviews on the Kindle Edition page, and the reviewer will describe the fine leather binding. This is especially frustrating now that I realize the actual content - the language - of the book I'm buying could be different from the one I read about online.
Since getting my Kindle, I've been impressed by the machine itself, but thoroughly unimpressed by Amazon's handling of content. They should focus less exclusively on getting people to buy the device, and work harder at improving the way they sell books and other content for it.
This is the reason people started to hate big box and online bookstores when they first started putting neighborhood bookstores out of business -- because they don't seem to care about books, just making money. But what's funny here is that they could actually charge money for the better translation, since it's new, but instead they choose to give away an inferior version and pretend it's the same thing. (They do offer the Pevear and Volokhonsky version of Demons for a price - a version easier to distinguish because the newer translation even changes the title from the less-accurate The Possessed - versions with that title are available for free.) Also, because they don't distinguish between different translations, there is no button available under the Pevear and Volokhonsky version to request that the publisher make it available for Kindle.
It's also difficult to know what version of a book is being reviewed sometimes. I'll be reading reviews on the Kindle Edition page, and the reviewer will describe the fine leather binding. This is especially frustrating now that I realize the actual content - the language - of the book I'm buying could be different from the one I read about online.
Since getting my Kindle, I've been impressed by the machine itself, but thoroughly unimpressed by Amazon's handling of content. They should focus less exclusively on getting people to buy the device, and work harder at improving the way they sell books and other content for it.
72 of 76 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Just a quick note to point out that if you're gonna read "Crime and Punishment" in English, the Jesse Coulson translation is indisputably the best one published to date.
Avoid at all costs the Garnett translation (as ubiquitous as it is stuffy), and try to keep away from the recently done one, the Pevear and Volokhonsky job (said to be breezy and inaccurate). The Sidney Monas translation (published in the Signet edition) is unimaginative, limp, and lifeless, lacking the oft-remarked vigor of Dostoevsky's prose. No, no: Coulson has never been outdone. Too bad he never did the Brothers K.
The only drawback with the Coulson translation, I must say, is that this guy does inject a lot of British slang, much of which can't be precisely deciphered even with the aid of a good desk dictionary. This is irritating.
However, the clarity and force of his work more than makes up for that shortcoming. He really knows how to make his characters speak differently, his descriptions are vivid and forceful, and the rhythm and dynamism of his prose can really knock you for a loop.
Admittedly, I'm not qualified to state whether all these characteristics were Dostoevsky's own and have merely been faithfully rendered into English by Coulson, or whether Coulson improved upon a stuffy and awkward original, as is perhaps suggested by the plethora of disagreeable translations. All I know is that using this translation will make your descent into Raskolinkov's world much more rewarding and memorable.
I should also note that the Coulson version is the translation employed in the Oxford World's Classics edition, which is also in print and available from Amazon. Naturally, that edition doesn't have all the critical essays the Norton edition has, but its footnotes are far more numerous and superior.
Avoid at all costs the Garnett translation (as ubiquitous as it is stuffy), and try to keep away from the recently done one, the Pevear and Volokhonsky job (said to be breezy and inaccurate). The Sidney Monas translation (published in the Signet edition) is unimaginative, limp, and lifeless, lacking the oft-remarked vigor of Dostoevsky's prose. No, no: Coulson has never been outdone. Too bad he never did the Brothers K.
The only drawback with the Coulson translation, I must say, is that this guy does inject a lot of British slang, much of which can't be precisely deciphered even with the aid of a good desk dictionary. This is irritating.
However, the clarity and force of his work more than makes up for that shortcoming. He really knows how to make his characters speak differently, his descriptions are vivid and forceful, and the rhythm and dynamism of his prose can really knock you for a loop.
Admittedly, I'm not qualified to state whether all these characteristics were Dostoevsky's own and have merely been faithfully rendered into English by Coulson, or whether Coulson improved upon a stuffy and awkward original, as is perhaps suggested by the plethora of disagreeable translations. All I know is that using this translation will make your descent into Raskolinkov's world much more rewarding and memorable.
I should also note that the Coulson version is the translation employed in the Oxford World's Classics edition, which is also in print and available from Amazon. Naturally, that edition doesn't have all the critical essays the Norton edition has, but its footnotes are far more numerous and superior.
Most Recent Customer Reviews
5.0 out of 5 stars
One of my favorite books of all time
Many of the people I know don't understand why I like this book. But I do. Its a classic worth reading.
Published 2 days ago by Ross Mullen
5.0 out of 5 stars
Amazing Novel---Everyone should read this
This is the third translation of Crime and Punishment that I have read and it met my expectations. This is an amazing, suspenseful piece of literary history. Read more
Published 12 days ago by Katie
5.0 out of 5 stars
Russians are crazy
And I love them for it. I read this book for AP Lit and it ended up being my favorite story. First off, there are so many themes that can be drawn from it that it's become my... Read more
Published 20 days ago by Laura L Sampson
1.0 out of 5 stars
Not my cup of tea
I do not think this book worthy of my review. In fact I gave up after only reading about ten percent of the pages
Published 22 days ago by David Bailey
4.0 out of 5 stars
Interesting read- self-punishment is harsh!
It took me a while to get into this story, and even then at places it was tedious, but I kept reading it. Something kept me interested. Read more
Published 22 days ago by vicki odum
3.0 out of 5 stars
nice book
Good book to keep you entertained,great writer and very free.Recommended.Good lecture,and interesting,it will keep you guessing til the end,perfect book
Published 22 days ago by Juan Padilla
3.0 out of 5 stars
Hard work
I found this hard to read. The lack of narrative and the incessant dialog hurt my brain. Overall, I enjoyed the concepts proposed in the book, especially concerning the superiority... Read more
Published 22 days ago by Dean Wise
4.0 out of 5 stars
Great classic
I was not certain what to expect when I started reading this book, having always heard references to it but never actually being told anything of the plot. Read more
Published 29 days ago by Kiki
5.0 out of 5 stars
favorite writer!
Dostoyevsky is a genius. His writing is brilliant! Excellent book, a must read. It is definatate lay Not a waste of time.
Published 1 month ago by julieann martinez
5.0 out of 5 stars
One of the best books of all time
This book is gloomy and sad, but the messages it holds are amazing. The story of how poverty and hard times pushes one to awful crime only to be punished and lowered even further. Read more
Published 1 month ago by Trenton Jackson
