Where should I start with him Veeky Forums? Also is there any importance in what translation I read?

This. It's literally impossible to understand even one page of Dostoyevski, even his childhood diaries, without a firm grip of ancient Hellenian philosophy, cosmology and arithmethics.

I got the Mcduff Brothers K. how fucked did I do myself in?

>tfw read C&P and have those other two on my shelf
I’ve read a bunch of 200 pages books while deciding with wich one I will proceed

I went Note, BK, Crime, The Idiot, and will be reading Demons soon.

Honestly, you can probably skip the idiot. It was his weakest novel (imo), and I got the least from it.

>expecting to get something from a book
The pages ain't sentient, they ain't going to hand you a giftcard for reading it, you brainlet faggot.

I second this.

Why do so many Veeky Forumsterers view him as the meme among the Russians?

Its literally his equal best with TBK.

Because he is popular

mcduff is good don't worry. if i had to criticise his translation i would say its a bit too wordy at times, and unnecessarily so. it ens up being about 10% longer than the other translations because of this. at some points it became a bit tedious for me/hard to understand what was going on because i had to focus hard on extracting the meaning of a sentence since there is a lot of unnecessary words. p/v for me is basically the same as mcduff but a bit more succinct and easy to understand. russians say that it is closest to the rhythm of the original russian. I've read both version and slightly prefer p/v basically but you definitely didn't do yourself in dw. mcduff is still fantastic. i would recommend you go for p/v for the others tho except for c&p where the new oliver ready translation is actually incredible and pushes p/v to no 2.

to any tolstoy anons, would you recommend p/v or maude?

Descarte this user. Go with Oxford/Penguin translations explcitly avoiding Vintage releases of P&V.

PV in Tolstoy are even worse that Dosto PV. Go with Maudes. For Warren Piece there's an Oxford release that fixes their mistakes and adds annotations, so it should be similar with their Anna K.

ok cheers. was leaning toward maude anyway seeing as they have the stamp of approval form tolstoy itself. looking forward to it

For Anna Karenina there's also some newer translation by Rosamund Bartlett from Oxford which may also be considered. Given that the second translation they sell is Maudes, it may be an upgrade. I only know Bartlett from some chapters of a book about Stravinsky, so can't really comment about the translation itself, but you may want to compare those two. As for P&V, they are really problematic in Tolstoy, not less than in Dostoe, but there at least they can disguise some of their faults. I compared at least 3 novels by P&V side-by-side with other releases and I was struck by the dumbing-down they procure. I was so surprised that I actually went to the original Russian text (which I can read a bit, being a Slav) and my opinion hasn't changed.

>mfw westerners have to worry which translation of Dostoyevsky to read

At least tell if you like PV or others better, comrade...

The House of the Dead is unironically Dosto at his best. Fight me IRL

>tfw Warsaw Pact country
>Lot of russian lit is very well translated and widely available from second hand stores for pennies on the dollar
It wasn't fucking worth it

Garnett is a fine stylist, so there's that silver lining. It is, however, the exact same style regardless of who she is translating, which is her greatest flaw, and why she should probably be avoided. Nevertheless she deserves respect for her industriousness, and for being so significant in bringing Russian literature to an anglophone audience.

Just throwing in another opinion here, but I find the vilification of P&V quite unjustified. I feel like this is an example of one of those opinions which started out as rebelling against a critical norm, but then acquired so much currency that it became the norm itself. Now all you ever hear is how bad they are. They aren't my favourite translators, but I always feel like white knighting for them because I think they get crapped on too much.

For example:
>Oн coшeл вниз, избeгaя пoдoлгy cмoтpeть нa нee, кaк нa coлнцe, нo oн видeл ee, кaк coлнцe, и нe глядя. (Vol 1., Ch. 9)

Maude:
>So he went down on the ice, not letting himself look long at her, as if she were the sun; but he saw her, as he saw the sun, even though he did not look at her.
Exacting; the repetition of "look at her" jars; choppy and lacking melody. The final "her" mars the sentence because its pronoun _should_ have the possibility of referring both to Kitty and the sun, that being the whole point of the simile.

Garnett:
>He walked down, for a long while avoiding looking at her as at the sun, but seeing her, as one does the sun, without looking.
A lovely sentence and a good translation. However...

P&V:
>He stepped down, trying not to look long at her, as if she were the sun, yet he saw her, like the sun, even without looking.
This is, to me, better. As with the Garnett, it sound lovely to the ear. But where it has the edge is in the way each clause respects the original while still managing to sound nice. Also, none of the translations maintain the и from the final clause, but I think this is impossible to render adequately into English -- as substition, I prefer P&V's "even" + present continuous over Maude's similar but less parsimonious "even though" + simple present, and Garnett's "without".

Anyway I invite others to take issue with me if I'm dead wrong or something. May also dig up another example later on tonight if I can be bothered.

Hi Toolstoy

That's interesting, user.
I'm without access to my library right now, but I have a Vintage release of Maudes translation on kindle and it says
>He stepped down, avoiding any long look at her as one avoids long looks at the sun, but seeing her as one sees the sun, without looking.
Does it change your hierarchy? Actually, that's pretty interesting, since it is Vintage kindle edition (pic rel) looks like a slightly-modified PV translation, but it explicitly says it's the Maudes translation. War and Peace in the same series is by PV, afaik. So what the hell am I reading anons?

I too am travelling and am without my library, so I got all of those quotations from.pdfs floating around the internet. Perhaps some of the texts were mislabelled, or perhaps I screwed up somewhere. Would be great if someone with access to the physical editions could check. In any case I found that translation enjoyable also. Is it an updated version of the Maude? I know that a number of translators have re-worked both Garnett and Maude, but I can't recall if the Vintage edition was one of them.

Marian Schwartz is the best translation of Anna Karenina, go with Maude for everything else.

I'm not sure if Maude translation by Vintage has been in any way altered, there's no notes regarding that; it is a pretty bare-bones release. I don't think it matters much here seeing how vastly different the two options (yours and mine) are. I only know that Oxford, who published both W&P and AK, have made certain corrections to the Maude W&P translation and included French translations, and that's the version I usually recommend, best of both worlds. They also have Maude AK (like Vintage that I own and quoted), and the relatively recent Bartlett AK.
>He walked down, trying to avoid looking at her for too long, as if she were the sun, but like the sun, he could still see her even when he was not looking at her.
That's Bartlett btw.

I have only read C&P by dosto and i found the most parts boring as fuck. Are the other books of his written the same or would I enjoy some other work more?

Even though it does have it's moralizing bits and monologues such as Ippolit's, the idiot is a portrait of Dosto's take on Russia's morals (or lack thereof) following the loss of christian values among middle class people.

The prince represents broken purity, try as he might he couldn't endure the uglyness of godless morals and went mad in the end. The book itself is a small window into Dostoievsky's heart.

Don't bother, its one of his best

because they are butthurt leftists.

what character from a dostoevsky book does most resemble the writer from Stalker?

you did good

What about the double?

Havent seen it but all i know is anatoly solonitsyn is fucking great in the mirror and andrei rublev.