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 Timeslast year, Pevear explained that “[Tolstoy’s] prose is full of … moments of fresh, immediate perception. Coming upon them and finding words for them in
