I visited Oliver Ready recently at St Antony’s College, Oxford, where he is a research fellow in Russian society and culture, to hear about his five-year engagement with Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment (Penguin Classics, 2014): what persuaded him to take the project on? how did he limber up for it? and why – unusually – did he write his version out longhand rather than work on a computer? Below, there is a short extract from our conversation: Oliver Ready: Something Russians talk a lot about in translation is the idea of a tuning fork when you’re setting out on a translation – ‘kamerton’ in Russian – and like an actor trying to get into the role you read something which isn’t a precise model, but which moves your linguistic resources in a particular direction and starts you thinking in particular rhythms. [Translating Crime and Punishment] was experimental for me because I’d never translated a classic before and the first question people ask is ‘What are you doing? Are you going to write in the archaic …