Garnett insists, is “Tchaikovsky.” When she recalls for the audience the arduous process of translating “Karamazov,” she confuses the four brothers with the “Three Sisters,” a stumble that leads inevitably to the musical number “O We Gotta Get to Moscow!” Mrs. The Russian for “hysterical homosexual,” Mrs. The mangling of the translator’s craft is a main plot point. In the first production of “The Idiots Karamazov,” at the Yale Repertory Theatre, Garnett was played by a student at the drama school named Meryl Streep, who portrayed the aged “translatrix” as a muddled loon. Which causes the angelic monk Alyosha to wonder, “How can there be a God if there are feet?” The main character is based not on any figure in Dostoyevsky but, rather, on his first and most enduring English-language translator, a woman of Victorian energies and Edwardian prose, Mrs. In the early seventies, two young playwrights, Christopher Durang and Albert Innaurato, collaborated on a satire about nineteenth-century Russian literature called “The Idiots Karamazov.” In their liberal interpretation of Dostoyevsky, Father Zosima is a gay foot fetishist. Constance Garnett’s versions of the great Russians inspired Hemingway but outraged exiled writers.
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