Leo Tolstoy
Russians Still Brooding Over Translations
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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Analyzing Bill Keller Analyzing War and Peace
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 »
The 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 »
Singer's Shadows, Part III: It's His Book of Job!
