Which Crime and Punishment Translation Should You Read? A Pick for Every Reader
Five English versions people actually argue about, one of them free, and how to pick between them in five minutes.
The picks come from reading the same paragraph in all five, and the paragraph is printed below so you can disagree. If you would rather meet Raskolnikov before choosing a translator at all, the playable Crime and Punishment starts in the same garret on the same hot evening, with a watch in his pocket and a decision he has not made yet.
🔤 How does each translation open the novel?
Every translator has to handle the same awkward first sentence: a hot evening in July, a young man leaving a rented room, a street named only by initials, and a walk he takes slowly, as though undecided. The extracts come from a side-by-side comparison page and are cut short so that each modern version is quoted for comparison only.
| Translator | Opening |
|---|---|
| Constance Garnett, 1914 | “On an exceptionally hot evening early in July a young man came out of the garret in which he lodged…” |
| David McDuff, 1991 | “At the beginning of July, during a spell of exceptionally hot weather, towards evening, a certain young man came down on to the street…” |
| Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, 1992 | “At the beginning of July, during an extremely hot spell, towards evening, a young man left the closet he rented from tenants in S—y Lane…” |
| Oliver Ready, 2014 | “In early July, in exceptional heat, towards evening, a young man left the garret he was renting in S—y Lane, stepped outside…” |
| Nicolas Pasternak Slater, 2017 | “One evening in early July, during a spell of exceptionally hot weather, a young man came out of the garret he rented…” |
Garnett folds the time of day into one smooth clause and moves on. McDuff, Pevear and Volokhonsky, and Ready keep the stacked phrases of the original, month and heat and hour, before the young man appears, and Pevear and Volokhonsky go furthest by calling his room a closet. Ready’s second sentence opens with a contraction, “He’d”, where Garnett and Pevear and Volokhonsky both write “He had”, a small sign of how conversational his English is going to be.
🆓 Garnett: free, old, and the text the game uses
Constance Garnett’s 1914 version is the text the playable book was built from, so every scene in the game reads in her English first. The Project Gutenberg edition credits her as translator on its title page and costs nothing to download, which settles the question for anyone who wants to start tonight.
On the sample above her sentence is the shortest and smoothest of the five, with the hour and the heat folded into a single opening phrase. Readers who like that calm, measured English are getting the whole novel, in a quieter register than the newer versions choose.
🆕 Ready and Slater: the two newest
Oliver Ready’s translation came out from Penguin Classics in 2014, and Penguin’s own page for it calls it an acclaimed new translation. On the sample above it is the most idiomatic of the modern versions: a few words past the cut, he has the young man set off “as if in two minds”, where McDuff writes “almost hesitantly” and Pasternak Slater “rather uncertainly”, and a voice that sounds like a person talking.
Nicolas Pasternak Slater’s version followed in 2017 from Oxford University Press, with an introduction and notes by Sarah J. Young. Its opening keeps Garnett’s plain “one evening” start and Ready’s garret, and the notes make it the better choice for a reader studying the novel rather than racing through it.
🧩 Pevear and Volokhonsky: odd on purpose
Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky published their Crime and Punishment in 1992. On the sample they stay closest to the Russian word choices, so a cramped room becomes a closet and a hesitant walk is taken “as if indecisively”, phrasing a native English writer would not usually choose.
Some readers enjoy that closeness, because it reminds them on every page that the book was written in another language. If it reads as stiff to you in the first paragraph, it will not loosen later, so read a page of each before buying either.
🎯 Which translation suits which reader
| If you want | Read |
|---|---|
| A first read that moves quickly | Oliver Ready (Penguin Classics, 2014) |
| To start tonight, for free | Constance Garnett (Project Gutenberg) |
| The Russian’s strangeness kept | Pevear and Volokhonsky (1992) |
| Notes and an introduction for study | Nicolas Pasternak Slater (Oxford, 2017) |
- Read one page before you buy. The opening paragraph is enough to tell which voice you can live with for the whole novel.
- The free version is a real translation. Garnett is older and smoother, and generations of readers finished the book in her English.
- Check the translator, not the cover.Older translations stay in print beside the new ones, so look for the translator’s name on the title page before you pay.
The full list of English versions, from the first in the 1880s to the 2022 one, is kept in the reference entry on the novel, where every year on this page can be checked.
Sources
- Crime and Punishment, translated by Constance Garnett (Project Gutenberg eBook #2554) — Project Gutenberg
- Crime and Punishment, translated by Oliver Ready — Penguin Books
- Compare translations: Crime and Punishment — We Love Translations
- What's the best translation of Crime and Punishment? — We Love Translations
- Crime and Punishment: English translations — Wikipedia
- The Pevearsion of Russian Literature — Commentary
Frequently asked questions
- Which translation of Crime and Punishment is easiest to read?
- Oliver Ready's is the usual answer, and this page agrees. Penguin's listing quotes A. N. Wilson in The Spectator calling it "A truly great translation" and notes it was a Times Literary Supplement Book of the Year in 2014. Easy is relative, though: read the opening paragraph of two versions and keep the one you forget you are reading.
- Which translation of Dostoevsky should I read?
- Pick a translator whose voice you like and stay with them across novels. Ready, a Research Fellow in Russian Society and Culture at St Antony's College, Oxford, suits readers who want natural modern English. Pevear and Volokhonsky have translated most of Dostoevsky's major novels, so readers who like their closeness can follow them book to book.
- Who translated Dostoevsky the best?
- There is no agreed winner, and the critics disagree loudly. In Commentary, the scholar Gary Saul Morson argued that the newer translators fall short of "the magnificent Constance Garnett", while many readers prefer the modern versions for their accuracy. Treat any single ranking as one reader's taste, and test the opening paragraph yourself.
- Is Constance Garnett's Crime and Punishment still worth reading?
- Yes, if you accept a smoother, older English. One small difference shows the style: she shortens Dostoevsky's half-hidden place names to plain initials, "S. Place" and "K. bridge", where the modern translators keep the dashes of the original. The story, the characters and the order of events are all there in full.
- Is there a free English translation of Crime and Punishment?
- Yes. Constance Garnett's translation is in the public domain and free on Project Gutenberg. It was not the first English version: Frederick Whishaw's translation appeared in 1885, decades before hers, but Garnett's is the free text most readers and most free ebook editions use today, and it is the one the playable book is built on.
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