Larissa Volokhonsky was born in Leningrad in 1945 and studied mathematical linguistics at Leningrad State University. She left the Soviet Union in 1973, spent two years in Israel, and moved to the United States in 1975, where she studied theology at Yale Divinity School and St Vladimir's Orthodox Theological Seminary. In 1985 she began translating with Richard Pevear. They now live in France.
Her public work is translation, mostly of Russian prose into English. With Pevear she has produced some thirty versions, including works by Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Gogol, Chekhov, Bulgakov and Pasternak. They read each draft aloud, with Pevear voicing the English while she follows the Russian text, listening for rhythm. Their stated aim is to keep the abruptness and odd syntax of the originals rather than smooth them into polite English. Before their Brothers Karamazov appeared in 1990, most English readers knew Dostoevsky through Constance Garnett.
That approach divides opinion. Their translations of Anna Karenina and The Brothers Karamazov each won the PEN/Book-of-the-Month Club Translation Prize, and their Idiot won the first Efim Etkind Translation Prize. Their Anna Karenina also became an Oprah Book Club selection. In 2016 the critic Janet Malcolm argued in The New York Review of Books that their Anna Karenina adds an unwelcome flavor to Tolstoy's plain prose, a view other readers reject.
Start with Anna Karenina, the book listed here. It is long, but it lets you judge their method on a famous text. If it works for you, try The Brothers Karamazov next. For something shorter, Gogol's Collected Tales or The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Other Stories are good places to go.
