Chekhov's short stories are an English translator's nightmare though - there's a reason he's much more famous as a playwright in the English-speaking world.

As an example, it says the following:

> ...His word for such acts of self-injury is, in English translations before P&V, “spite.” It is fair to say that to miss the concept of spite is to miss the work entire.

> But that is just what P&V do. Instead of “spite,” they give us “wickedness.” Now, the Russian word zloi can indeed mean “wicked.” But no one with the faintest idea of what this novella is about, with any knowledge of criticism from Dostoevsky’s day to ours, or with any grasp of Dostoevskian psychology, would imagine that the book’s point is that people are capable of wickedness.

From my copy of the P&V translation for this book, toward the end of the Foreword, Pevear says the following:

> There is, however, one tradition of mistranslation attached to Notes from Underground that raises something more than a question of “mere tone”. The second sentence of the book, Ya zloy chelovék, has most often been rendered as "I am a spiteful man." Zloy is indeed at the root of the Russian word for "spiteful" (zlobnyi), but it is a much broader and deeper word, meaning "wicked," "bad," "evil." The wicked witch in Russian folktales is zláya véd'ma (zláya being the feminine of zloy). The opposite of zloy is dóbryi, "good," as in "good fairy" (dóbraya feya). This opposition is of great importance for Notes from Underground; indeed it frames the book, from "I am a wicked man" at the start to the outburst close to the end: "They won't let me...I can't be...good!" We can talk about the inevitable loss of nuances in translating from Russian into English (or from any language into any other), but the translation of zloy as "spiteful" instead of "wicked" is not inevitable, not is it a matter of nuance. It speaks for that habit of substituting the psychological for the moral, of interpreting a spiritual condition as a kind of behavior, which has so bedeviled our century, not least in its efforts to understand Dostoevsky.

Translations are, by their very nature, open to interpretation and oftentimes small details and nuance gets lost. And then you get debates about things like the aforementioned comparison. As such, it's more practical to look for a good translation than the best translation.