Contance Garnett

I have been re-reading Constance Garnett's translation of The Devils by Fyodor Dostoyevsky. This remarkable woman, having attained a government scholarship, studied Latin and Greek at Cambridge University. Later on, married and pregnant, she began to learn Russian.
And having learnt Russian she began translating, and thereby introduced the Great Russian Novel to the English speaking world. Through her translations, authors such as Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Chekhov, Turgenev, Gogol, and Herzen became known in the Anglosphere.
Of course, she had her critics, and no doubt sometimes the voice of the translator becomes mixed with that of the writer, but, for all that, through her vivid translations, many a young peasant, like myself, has been introduced to the magical world of those crazy Russians.
In all, Constance Garnett translated some 71 volumes of Russian literary words - that is some going!
All these translations were accurate and the quality of the prose was high. She was an explorer into the depths of the Russian soul, revealing to us a New World, a world of visionaries, saints, great egotists, nihilists and criminals, the great of the earth, and the wretched, the desperate and the destitute.
So now I'm going to put the samovar on, make my myself a nice cup of tea, and read a few more pages of sublime prose.