(And don't ignore Constance Garnett a lot of people thoughtlessly put her down as 'Victorian' or whatever, but her versions are usually quite good if you don't find the prose too old-fashioned.) But chacun à son gout-the important thing is to find a translation you personally enjoy. All translators make mistakes (I've just found some doozies in the work of a translator I generally respect a lot), and it's silly to highlight an error or two and use it to discredit the whole translation, but yeah, P&V have an odd and probably unhelpful way of working together and the result is (to me and others like nasreddin) off-putting and unrepresentative of the Russian. Lots of people like them (some of them may even like them because of their prose, rather than because they've bought the hype), and if you try them and they make you enjoy the novel, then fine, read them, but my advice is always to read a chunk of as many different translations as you can find and pick the one that most makes you want to keep reading (this is particularly important for long novels like W&P, of course). Their hype machine irritates the hell out of me, but I wouldn't say they're the worst available choice they are certainly not the best, however. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky pretty much own anything they've translated from the Russian
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