The Partnership and Its Position
Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky have been translating Russian literature into English together since the 1980s. Their method is described consistently in publisher's notes and their own interviews: Volokhonsky, a native Russian speaker, produces a close working draft; Pevear, who does not read Russian fluently, revises it into English while consulting the Russian text with her assistance. The result is then refined between them. Their translations of Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Bulgakov, and Gogol have dominated the anglophone market since their Dostoevsky renditions began appearing from Vintage in the early 1990s. The Brothers Karamazov (1990) won the PEN/Book-of-the-Month Club Translation Prize; subsequent volumes followed at roughly two-year intervals. By the 2010s, their translations were set texts in university courses across the United States and Britain and stocked as default editions by most English-language publishers. That dominance is itself part of what made the dispute matter.
Three Charges, Each With a Passage
Charge one: register literalism. The most sustained critical objection is that Pevear and Volokhonsky reproduce syntactic and lexical structures from Russian at the expense of natural English idiom. The critic Gary Saul Morson, writing in The New Criterion in 2010, argued that the translations prize foreignness so heavily that the result is often awkward rather than defamiliarising. The opening of Crime and Punishment is where this argument typically lands. Constance Garnett's 1914 version of the same passage smooths Raskolnikov's mental state into fluent Victorian English; the Pevear-Volokhonsky rendering of "he had grown so absorbed in himself and isolated from everyone" preserves a lumpy coordinate structure closer to Dostoevsky's syntax than Garnett's and closer to what later translators such as Oliver Ready would also attempt. Critics who accept Morson's position read that lumpiness as a failure of English; defenders read it as fidelity to Dostoevsky's deliberate roughness, his refusal of literary finish. The passage does not resolve the argument; it is the argument.
Charge two: loss of idiom and ear. The literary scholar David Remnick and others have observed that Russian idiomatic expressions sometimes survive Pevear-Volokhonsky translation in ways that feel neither Russian nor English — a third register, legible but tonally flat. The challenge is demonstrated with a passage from Dead Souls: Gogol's comic idiom depends on a particular variety of bureaucratic pomposity shading into absurdity, and the degree to which a translator allows that absurdity into the English determines whether the comedy lands. Comparative readings of Pevear-Volokhonsky against the 1961 Magarshack translation, and against the later 2008 Robert Chandler and Elizabeth Cook version for Hesperus Press, reveal genuine divergence — not in what Gogol is made to say but in how much comic pressure the English is under. The Pevear-Volokhonsky passage tends to specify where Gogol is vague and to deflate where he is inflated, a tendency noted by critics and translators working at the literary level rather than the commercial one.
Charge three: the co-authorship problem. The process — non-Russian-reading Pevear shaping the English prose — has attracted the sharpest ad hominem attacks, some from practicing translators. Marian Schwartz, in her public statements about translation practice, has emphasised that Russian syntax is integral to Russian meaning in ways that require the translator to inhabit both languages simultaneously. The charge against the Pevear-Volokhonsky method is that Pevear is, in effect, editing a gloss rather than translating. The defence — made by Volokhonsky in various interviews and implicit in the method's long record — is that the collaboration does precisely what good translation should: it subjects every sentence to two readers with different relationships to the source and target languages. Nabokov translated with almost no collaboration; his Eugene Onegin commentary is famously accurate and famously unreadable. The Pevear-Volokhonsky approach is a different theory, not a disqualification.
What the Defenders Say, and Where
The defence of Pevear and Volokhonsky tends to come from two directions. The first is from readers who came to Dostoevsky or Tolstoy through these translations and found the experience of the novels transformed — the sense that they were reading a more urgent, less Victorian text than Garnett had given them. This is not a negligible argument. Constance Garnett's translations shaped anglophone Russian literature for nearly a century; their fluency was also their limitation, smoothing out the very elements — Dostoevsky's repetitions, Tolstoy's syntactic mass — that define the originals as stylistic events. Pevear and Volokhonsky made those elements visible. Whether that constitutes fidelity or literalism depends entirely on what you believe translation is for.
The second line of defence is more technical. The scholar and translator Michael Katz has noted that specific Pevear-Volokhonsky word choices in The Brothers Karamazov track Dostoevsky's own deliberate repetitions of root words — a feature of his theological prose that Garnett normalised out of existence. In the chapter titled "The Grand Inquisitor," both versions can be read against the original: Garnett's translation of the key passage concerning freedom and miracle is smoother; the Pevear-Volokhonsky version preserves a more staccato rhythm that matches the Inquisitor's rhetorical technique. Whether that rhythm constitutes a translation achievement or merely an imitation of a Russian speech pattern in English depends, again, on first principles about the genre.
What the Passages Settle and What They Don't
Thirty years of published argument has not produced consensus, which is itself informative. Both Marian Schwartz and Oliver Ready have produced translations of Russian novels that proceed from different first principles — Schwartz's recent Tolstoy work emphasises colloquial naturalness; Ready's Crime and Punishment for Penguin Classics in 2014 was reviewed explicitly as a correction of Pevear-Volokhonsky. Ready's version of the novel's famous opening sentence preserves Raskolnikov's evasiveness in a different way than either Garnett or Pevear-Volokhonsky, foregrounding the character's self-distancing grammar. The existence of three serious versions of the same passage, each producing a distinctly different Raskolnikov, is a fair summary of what the debate has actually demonstrated: that there is no single English equivalent to Dostoevsky's Russian, and that the choice between versions is partly a literary judgment and partly a historical one about which moment you are reading from.
The specific charge that Pevear and Volokhonsky have crowded out other translators by commercial dominance is harder to dispute. Their publisher arrangements with Vintage, Farrar Straus and Giroux, and Penguin Classics have produced an almost complete set of major Russian prose in their versions, which are then adopted as course texts in a self-reinforcing cycle. Whether a better translation of Anna Karenina exists is a question that most undergraduates reading Pevear-Volokhonsky in a set text will never have occasion to ask. That is not a verdict on the translations themselves — it is a description of how a canon forms, and of what it costs when one method wins the market without winning the argument.
