Books December 2009
After the masterpiece
A review of The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Other Stories by Leo Tolstoy.
Richard Pevear & Larissa Volokhonsky, --> reviewed by Alexander Nazaryan -->
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...
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