The modern front-runner, and many readers’ outright favourite. Oliver Ready set out to catch the book’s fever in living English, and his prose has real nervous energy, colloquial, headlong, and true to the way Raskolnikov’s mind lurches and doubles back. He is faithful without being stilted, and his Penguin edition is well introduced and annotated. Some purists prefer the harder literalism of Pevear and Volokhonsky, and it is in copyright, so not free. But if you want one modern Crime and Punishment that reads like a living novel and keeps you inside the delirium, Ready is the one to reach for first.
Oliver Ready
A Research Fellow at Oxford and translator of Russian prose; his 2014 Penguin Crime and Punishment is widely held to be the best modern English version.