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Constance Garnett (née Black) (December 19, 1861 - December 17, 1946) was an English translator whose translations of nineteenth-century Russian classics first introduced them on a wide basis to the English public. Garnett is the first English translator of Dostoevsky and Chekhov.
Garnett studied Latin and Greek, worked shortly as a school teacher and then, in 1893, started translating Russian literature, which became her life passion. She translated works by Goncharov, Turgenev, and Leo Tolstoy, whom she met while visiting Moscow in 1892. Constance Garnett translated dozens of thick volumes by Gogol, Dostoevsky, Pushkin, Turgenev, Ostrovsky, and Chekhov.
Her husband, Edward Garnett, was a distinguished reader for the publisher Jonathan Cape. Her son David Garnett trained as a biologist and later wrote novels. His most successful was Lady Into Fox.
Constance Garnett's translations of Russian classics have been highly acclaimed in her time, and is still often reprinted, although at present they may seem somewhat outdated. Although she keeps close to the syntax and vocabulary of the original, she occasionally excised certain text liberally, as in her translations of Dostoevsky. It is occasionally claimed that she "retold Russian literature in Victorian English"; this is not strictly true, as the English she used is Edwardian rather than Victorian.
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