“Notes from Underground” now sells eight thousand copies a year, “Crime and Punishment” twelve thousand, “The Brothers Karamazov” fourteen thousand, “Anna Karenina” twenty thousand.

“Hemingway read Garnett’s Dostoyevsky and he said it influenced him,” he continued. “But Hemingway was just as influenced by Constance Garnett as he was by Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Garnett breaks things into simple sentences, she Hemingwayizes Dostoyevsky, if you see what I mean.”

Dostoyevsky’s detractors have faulted him for erratic, even sloppy, prose and what Nabokov, the most famous of the un-fans, calls his “gothic rodomontade.”