As the Observer's Leon Neyfakh wrote this summer, the new (and old) translations of War and Peace are causing a raucous among the Russian literary elite. But the New York Review of Books' Orlando Figes writes in his review of Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky's new version of Tolstoy's classic that hating on translators is nothing new.

No one did more to introduce the English-speaking world to Russian literature than Constance Garnett (1862– 1946), who translated into graceful late-Victorian prose seventy major Russian works, including seventeen volumes of Turgenev, thirteen volumes of Dostoevsky, six of Gogol, four of Tolstoy, six of Herzen, seventeen of Chekhov, and books by Goncharov and Ostrovsky.

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]]> http://www.observer.com/2007/russians-still-brooding-over-translations#comments Arts & Culture Leo Tolstoy New York Review of Books War and Peace Fri, 02 Nov 2007 15:15:53 -0400 Gillian Reagan 59800 at http://www.observer.com http://www.observer.com/2007/analyzing-bill-keller-analyzing-i-war-and-peace-i

In the Times’s new online book club, Reading Room, participants (including author Francine Prose, and frequent Book Review contributor Liesl Schillinger) and moderator/Book Review editor Sam Tanenhaus are debating a new translation of Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace. Another participant is Times executive editor Bill Keller, whose thoughts on the novel seemed not irrelevant to how he perceives the paper and his role there—and reveals more than a little bit about his personality.

“Somehow I managed to make it through college and into late middle age without having read War and Peace… W&P was always too intimidating in scale, and too show-offy to bring to the beach.”  read more »

]]> http://www.observer.com/2007/analyzing-bill-keller-analyzing-i-war-and-peace-i#comments Arts & Culture Media Bill Keller Leo Tolstoy Liesl Schillinger Sam Tanenhaus The New York Times Tue, 23 Oct 2007 08:26:21 -0400 Doree Shafrir 59209 at http://www.observer.com http://www.observer.com/2007/war-over-war-and-peace

Two new translations of Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace will be published in the United States this fall, one claiming to be the definitive version and the other claiming to be the long lost, more accessible first draft.  read more »

]]> http://www.observer.com/2007/war-over-war-and-peace#comments Media Ecco Press Leo Tolstoy The Knopf Publishing Group Thu, 23 Aug 2007 08:11:02 -0400 Leon Neyfakh 57202 at http://www.observer.com http://www.observer.com/node/40362 In the last installment of my serialized response to Shadows on the Hudson , Isaac Bashevis Singer's  read more »]]> http://www.observer.com/node/40362#comments Central Park Isaac Bashevis Singer Jerusalem Leo Tolstoy Sun, 05 Apr 1998 20:00:00 -0400 Ron Rosenbaum 40362 at http://www.observer.com