Constance Garnett: The Great Literary Translator — A Short Profile

She had a great fear of Lenin…

Constance Garnett. Image: George Allen & Unwin — The Garnett Family

If, like me, you started to read, in English, the great Russian novelists and playwrights, in the 1950s and 1960s, you probably read the Constance Garnett translations. Garnett almost single-handedly made Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Turgenev, Chekhov, and the rest of them, available to the English speaking (and reading) world…