It’s easy to forget that some of the greatest works of fiction—Proust, Dostoevsky, Kafka—require the work of a translator to make them available to rubes like me. Thank heaven, then, for Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, the husband-and-wife team that just put its stamp on the last of Tolstoy’s major writings.
“We want to recreate Tolstoy in English,” explained Volokhonsky about their approach to translating the master of Russian fiction. “We want to bring the English reader to Tolstoy, not Tolstoy to the English reader.”
Humanities has the rest of the story.
