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 Dostoevsky translates Henry James   …here were time and reverse-time, co-existing, cancelling one another exactly out. Were there many such reference points, scattered through the world, perhaps only at nodes like this room which housed a transient population of the imperfect, the dissatisfied; did real time plus virtual or mirror-time equal zero and thus serve some half-understood moral purpose? – Thomas Pynchon, V   Dostoevsky scholarship has largely ignored Dostoevsky’s translation of Henry James’ Altar of the House of the Dead . In this paper, we  attempt to chart the hitherto unremarked influence of James on Dostoevsky. Under-remarked is, perhaps, the fairer, the choicer, the more exact assessment – in Leon Edel’s four volume biography of Dostoevsky, volume 2 devotes a good three pages to the circumstances of the translation, but – in spite of his, that is to say Edel’s, extraordinary extensiveness, his rather beautiful and at the same time rather ‘creepy’ ability to slip