The New Criterion

Five years ago, in the spring of 2005, Leo Tolstoy received what might just be the greatest posthumous accolade of his career: Anna Karenina was selected for Oprah Winfrey’s Book Club. Tolstoy may have never won a Nobel Prize, but there he was, sharing the bestseller list with detectives and self-help gurus. The book club selection had less to do with Tolstoy himself than his translators, Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, who have contemporized Tolstoy without pandering to contemporary sensibilities. Tolstoy is perhaps the most Russian of the great Russian writers of the nineteenth century, and the duo has managed to convey the rather simple elegance of his prose without the Victorian affectations that have long marred translations of his work. Even if you can’t read in Russian, you get the distinctive feeling that this is what it should read like.

Pevear and Volokhonsky’s War and Peace (2008) was a triumph, too, easily one of the best translations published in recent memory. Much has been made of their translation process, which involves two unorthodox steps: she, a native of St. Petersburg, translates the text exactly into English, after which Pevear—who admits to not knowing Russian well—edits the English, and they both work on a final draft.

In an essay for The New York Times last year, Pevear explained that “[Tolstoy’s] prose is full of … moments of fresh, immediate perception. Coming upon them and finding words for them in English has been one of the most rewarding aspects of our work.” To wit: a passage in which a character eats French turtle soup, which may or may not contain scallops, depending on how the word “grebeshki” is translated. The matter was apparently resolved by a knowledgeable guest at a dinner in Paris, where, as one might expect, such things are known.

That kind of uncompromising diligence is also evident in the couple’s new translation of Tolstoy’s short stories, The Death of Ivan Ilyich. Many of them were written later in life, after the triumph of his two great novels, when Tolstoy had retired to his family estate at Yasnaya Polyana and plunged into a prolonged period of spiritual contemplation that led him to a Christian communalism. He renounced the worldly comforts that had been his birthright; his newfound concern for the salvation of poor folk and suspicions of authority rankled the Russian Orthodox Church, which finally excommunicated him in 1901.

The tales here are more reticent than the sweeping epics for which Tolstoy is much better known. The Death of Ivan Ilyich finds its way onto the occasional high school English class curriculum, and yet that protagonist is hardly the equal of Anna Karenina or Andrei Bolkonsky; “The Kreutzer Sonata” and “Master and Man” are sometimes anthologized, but few readers will know “Father Sergius” or “The Forged Coupon.”

As Pevear points out in his introduction, “there is no such thing as a ‘Tolstoy story,’” no distinctive style or single concern. “Hadji Murat” is about a Caucasian warrior who defects to the Russians; “Alyosha the Pot” is about a young peasant boy in love. All of Russia is here, its ruling classes and soldiers and serfs, the eternal war in the Caucasus and the courtly flourishes of Petersburg, the countryside and the mountains. One of the pleasures of this collection is just how much of Russia it manages to fit between its covers.

If there is a unifying theme here, it is the one encountered by Konstantin Levin at the conclusion of Anna Karenina. The wealthy, intellectually restless landowner is clearly based on Tolstoy, both in his tortured sexual dealings and profound concern for the serfs. In the novel’s triumphant final scene, Levin wanders through his fields deep in thought, overwhelmed by his own mortality: “Why is all this being done? … What am I standing here and making them work for? Why are they bustling about and trying to show me their zeal? … And above all, not only they, but I, too, will be buried and nothing will be left. What for?”

This preoccupation with the troubling absolutes of existence—stripping down the gilt icons of the Orthodox church to reveal the cracked wood beneath—brought Tolstoy to what Pevear calls “true Christianity,” which he describes as an “anti-State, anti-Church, egalitarian doctrine of the kingdom of God on earth, to be achieved by means of civil disobedience and non-violent resistance.” The Soviets conveniently forgot all this. “He loves the serfs, he stood with the proletariat!” the Politburo drones crowed. Pevear is good to remind us that the aging Tolstoy—while certainly a radical in his own way—was about as much a Bolshevik as Warren Buffett.

His distaste for displays of Russian power is especially evident in “Hadji Murat,” a tale of the campaign in the Caucasus in which Tolstoy served as a youth. Russia’s desire to subjugate Eurasia was as cruel under Czar Nicholas as it is today under Czar Vladimir, and the Chechens have long occupied a place in the Russian imagination as fierce fighters and lusty men of the earth.

But for Tolstoy, Hadji Murat is not a noble savage but merely noble, certainly more so than the Russian forces to whom he contemplates defecting in order to rescue his family from a rival clan leader, Shamil. In his dealings with the Russians, Hadji Murat is munificent and gracious, thinking only of his captured kin. The Russians are often drunk and nearly always inept, the officers captivated by little more than self-preservation and the “poetic notion of war.” Hadji Murat dutifully bows his head to Allah; the Russians bow to the Czar’s “cruel, insane, and dishonest supreme will,” and the moral chasm between these two parties propels the story to its inevitable conclusion.

“Master and Man,” set in the deceptively pastoral milieu of a wintry Russian village, is another tale in which the purity of a simple soul must contend with the cobwebs of status and greed. The landowner Brekhunov takes his peasant Nikita on a sleigh ride to purchase a large tract of land. But it is dark, and they become stuck in a snowy ravine. Camped out in the sled, the two men engage in Tolstoy’s favorite activity: contemplation. Brekhunov, afraid of death, “thought of ever the same thing, which constituted the sole aim, meaning, joy, and pride of his life—of how much money he had made and might still make.” Nikita also knows they might die, but this worries him less because “he always felt himself dependent in this life on the chief master, the one who had sent him into this life, and he knew that, on dying, he would remain in the power of that same master.”

In fact, Tolstoy’s obsession with death was already evident in both War and Peace and Levin’s sections of Anna Karenina. But it is especially pronounced here, from the profound, if slight, “Alyosha the Pot,” to “The Death of Ivan Ilyich” in which mortality receives its most concentrated treatment. In the latter, a legal clerk faced with an incurable illness is treated with a magisterial—but also uncompromising—understanding of la condition humaine: “The past history of Ivan Ilyich’s life was most simple and ordinary and most terrible.” He is, like so many of the characters here, a small man, concerned only with his own well-being while life’s verities loom on the horizon. And yet, as he nears death, even Ivan Ilyich is able to achieve some of that grand insight that had been given to his creator:

It occurred to him that what had formerly appeared impossible to him, that he had not lived his life as he should have, might be true… . His work, and his living conditions, and his family, and these social and professional interests—all might have been not right. He tired to defend it all to himself. And he suddenly felt all the weakness of what he was defending. And there was nothing left to defend.

The translation here, as elsewhere, is clear and unobtrusive. As much as they can, Pevear and Volokhonsky step aside to let Tolstoy speak in his own largely unadorned language. Some have complained that Pevear and Volokhonsky, while professing their adherence to the original, have obscured the stylistic nuances of the Russian language. Well, maybe. But translation is a famously contentious business, and, vagaries of nineteenth-century Russian aside, Pevear and Volokhonsky have done an excellent job with Tolstoy.