Description: "The Constance Garnett translation has been revised throughout by the editor."
Brief description:
Constance Garnett (1861-1946) was the first person to translate Anton Chekhov's work into English, and the first to translate most of Fyodor Dostoevsky's work as well. Her translations of those two and other Russian writers, including Tolstoy and Turgenev established the achievements of Russian literature for English-language readers for the first time. She ultimately translated seventy-one works from Russian into English, and most of them remain in print today.
Review Quotes:
"It is good to have a complete collection of Gogol's tales in paperback. . . . Professor Kent has thoroughly revised Mrs. Garnett's conscientious and skillful translation, eliminating the Victorianisms of her style, correcting mistakes and pruderies of diction, and making the whole translation sound much more contemporary and alive. But he has avoided the whimsicality and 'curliness' in which some recent translators indulged, and he has not changed or suppressed anything material. He has also supplied helpful notes which are often the first annotation in English, and he has written an introduction which steers the correct middle course between making Gogol an irresponsible artist of the grotesque and proving him a documentary historian of backward Russia."
--René Wellek, Yale University