Notes from the Basement

Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky are two of the best literary translators working today. Unfortunately, they translate a lot of Dostoevsky. Their latest is Notes from Underground, which is one of those works about which no undergrad can ever seem to write a decent paper. I remember marking for a Dostoevskii course once and noticing how all of the Notes papers were weird and just plain bad. The professor confided in me that normal people never write about it (except for Gary Saul Morson, of course). I wrote a paper about it once, but I hated every bloody moment of it, especially since I didn't have a choice...

Here's hoping that if Pevear and Volokhonsky are going to continue with Dostoevskii, they turn their attention to what is, in my opinion, his best novel (and the only one I've ever finished): The Double. And please don't tell me that I'm mistaken and try to convince me that either Crime and Punishment or The Brothers Karamazov are his best novels because they plumb the depths of the human psyche, explore deep thoughts, yadda, yadda, yadda, because, well, they're just not very interestingly written. Actually, they're borderline poorly written. If an author has to exhaust the thesaurus entries for "indescribable" and "inscrutable," he/she should probably not be writing fiction. -Zh.