HANDSOMELY BOUND SET OF THE WORKS OF DOESTOEVSKY

(DOSTOEVSKY, Fyodor) DOSTOIEFFSKY, Fedor. The Novels of Fyodor Dostoevsky. London: William Heinemann, (1945-58). Twelve volumes. Octavo, modern three-quarter burgundy morocco gilt, raised bands, black morocco spine labels, top edges gilt. $8200.

Handsomely bound set of the novels of Dostoevsky, with the "pioneering" Constance Garnett translations into English.

Together with Tolstoy, Dostoevsky was "integral to the flowering of the Russian novel in the 19th century… in them was assembled much of the light that we possess on the nature of man" (Steiner, 8). Constance Garnett's "pioneering" translations in English were first published in the early 20th century. "The breadth and impact of Garnett's translation work… makes her an extraordinary figure in 20th-century literature… her Dostoevsky in particular made an enormous impact on Virginia Woolf" (Oxford Guide to Literature in English Translations, 595, 29). "In A Moveable Feast, Hemingway recounts scouring Sylvia Beach's shelves for the Russians and finding in them a depth and accomplishment he had never known… 'In Dostoevsky there were things believable and not to be believed, but some so true they changed you as you read them'… Hemingway recalls telling a friend, a young poet named Evan Shipman, that he could never get through War and Peace—'not until I got the Constance Garnett translation'" (New Yorker). Includes The Friend of the Family (first published in Russian in 1859), The Insulted and Injured (1861), The House of the Dead (1861), Crime and Punishment (1886), The Gambler (1867), The Idiot (1869), The Eternal Husband (1869), The Possessed (1872), A Raw Youth (1875), The Brothers Karamazov (1880) and the collections An Honest Thief and White Nights .

Fine condition.