What should a translation accomplish? The answer depends on the sort of work one is translating. Style does not matter in a scientific research report. Translations of philosophical treatises must, above all, present the argument correctly, which means the translator must actually understand it in order to choose the right terms. In a work of epistemology, it is a mistake to translate the Russian word oshchushchenie as “feeling” rather than “sensation,” even though both appear in a Russian-English dictionary. Dictionaries are never enough, and one can always tell that a translator doesn’t understand his job when he justifies his choices by referring to one. By relying on a dictionary, you could make a case for translating Pascal’s famous description of man not as a “thinking reed” but as a “cogitating clarinet.”
The key issue, in short, is purpose. Why is one undertaking the translation in the first place? Who is its intended audience? What is the most important thing to preserve if the purpose of translating is to be accomplished? Google Translate doesn’t worry about such questions. People should.
So let us ask: What is the purpose of translating Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, Gogol’s Dead Souls, or Dostoevsky’s Notes From Underground? Unless one specifies otherwise, it is to convey what makes these works masterpieces. The reader of the translation should be able to experience, as closely as possible, what a sensitive reader of the original might experience. That is the only way to appreciate what makes the work great.
One must therefore translate the work, not the words on the page. They are not the same. In recent decades, it has become a mark of sophistication to equate the work with “the text,” but translators who do so make a fundamental error. The text is no more the work than a score is music. The work is the experience the text is designed to produce. It is entirely possible to read a text and miss the work, and scholars often do so. To regard such concerns as philistine is to consider Shakespeare, Dickens, and Tolstoy philistine, since they, above all, kept in mind the experience of readers (or audiences).
Russian literature has been blessed with some splendid translators. In the early twentieth century, when Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Turgenev came to be widely read in English, they astonished readers, critics, and the most important novelists. In her essay “The Russian Point of View,” Virginia Woolf explained that while English novels leave readers comfortably “on shore,” great Russian fiction plunges them into the water. We read “feverishly, wildly, we rush on and on, now submerged, now in a moment of vision understanding more than we have ever understood before, and receiving such revelations as we are wont to get only from the press of life at its fullest.” We see the naked human soul, experience “its passion, its tumult, its astonishing medley of beauty and vileness.… Out it tumbles upon us, hot, scalding, mixed, marvelous, terrible, oppressive—the human soul.” This is a description of an experience. It describes what translators should convey.
Until recently, most readers have encountered Russian classics in the versions of Constance Garnett, and many still do. In most cases, the best versions of Russian novels are revisions of Garnett that have corrected her lapses but preserved what is superb in her. Garnett, whose circle included Joseph Conrad, Ford Madox Ford, and D.H. Lawrence, understood the language of novels and how great realist fiction works. So did a later translator, Ann Dunnigan, the only one to do so even better.
Garnett and Dunnigan kept in mind something not on the page, the genre of realist novels, the ways in which they differ from other long fictional works. Garnett was at home with realism, which is probably why her versions of Turgenev surpass her Dead Souls, a satire that she treats as if it were just another realist masterpiece instead of something fundamentally different. (Perhaps the best translation of Russian fiction ever done is Bernard Guilbert Guerney’s version of Dead Souls, revised to good effect by Susanne Fusso, which manages to preserve Gogol’s wacky humor, his feel for odd words and humorous sounds, and his taste for sheer nonsense digressing into more nonsense as an endless sentence seems to wander through a maze of irrelevant and surprising associations.11xNikolai Gogol, Dead Souls, trans. Bernard Guilbert Guerney, rev. and ed. by Susanne Fusso (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996).)
To translate realist fiction, one must grasp the essential device that defines it, what is often called “free indirect discourse,” or, to use Mikhail Bakhtin’s term, “double-voicing.”22xOn double-voicing and the language of novels, see chapter 5 of Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, trans. Caryl Emerson (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 181–269; M.M. Bakhtin, “Discourse in the Novel,” The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1981), 259–422. So far as I can tell, the first author to use this device throughout a work was Jane Austen, which is why I think that, for all the praise accorded her, she is underrated. Without this invention, the great realist fiction that followed would be unthinkable.
Free indirect discourse is usually defined as narration that is third-person in form and first-person in meaning. The author records the character’s thoughts from within, paraphrases them using the character’s particular language, and presents them in the sequence they unfold in the character’s mind. Bakhtin deemed the emphasis on purely technical properties (third-person form, first-person meaning) inadequate because it misses the purpose such narration serves: The reader can simultaneously hear two voices and trace two points of view. That is why he called it “double-voicing.” We sense both the character’s inner voice and the author’s different, often ironic, one. Sometimes, more than two points of view are evoked, if, for instance, the author should suggest—say, by his choice of words—what another character might think if she could listen in.
For a simple example, consider a passage that occurs in the second chapter of Anna Karenina. Stepan Arkadyevich (Stiva), whose wife, Dolly, has just discovered his infidelity, meditates on the situation. The passage begins: “Stepan Arkadyevich was a truthful man with himself. He was incapable of deceiving himself and persuading himself that he repented of his conduct.” These are Stiva’s thoughts. He is saying to himself: I am a truthful person with myself, too honest to persuade myself that I am sorry for what I did. It’s a self-serving idea of truthfulness, of course. We wonder: Is this how philanderers understand honesty? Do all deceivers consider themselves “truthful”?
The passage continues:
He could not at this date feel repentant that he, a handsome, woman-prone man of thirty-four, was not in love with his wife, the mother of five living and two dead children, and only a year younger than himself. All he was sorry about was that he had not succeeded better in hiding it from his wife.… Possibly he might have managed to conceal his sins better from his wife if he had anticipated the effect on her should she discover them. He had never clearly thought out the subject, but he had vaguely conceived that his wife must long ago have suspected him of being unfaithful to her, and shut her eyes to the fact. He had even supposed that she, a worn-out woman no longer young or good-looking, and in no way remarkable or interesting, merely a good mother, ought from a sense of fairness to take an indulgent view. It had turned out quite the other way.33xAll passages in this section are from Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, trans. Constance Garnett, rev. Leonard J. Kent and Nina Berberova (New York, NY: Modern Library, 1965), 5–6.
Stiva’s thoughts unfold: He first tells himself that he is not sorry, because, given who he is and what his wife had become, the outcome was only natural. To be sure, he concedes, he might have taken more care to conceal the infidelities, but how could he have anticipated his wife’s reaction? He had never given the matter much thought, because he had just assumed, as any reasonable person would, that Dolly would realize how unattractive she had become, would understand that she was nothing more than “a good mother,” and so take “an indulgent view.” Alas, for some reason, “it had turned out quite the other way”!
The multiple ironies readers may discover in this passage testify to the presence of another point of view, a perspective Stiva does not imagine. When Stiva argues that he is, of course, “not in love with his wife, the mother of five living and two dead children, and only a year younger than himself,” readers may wonder how Dolly would react to this reference to the dead children, which Stiva can so effortlessly mention in passing, in a sentence focusing more on Dolly’s age. Then readers may be surprised that, despite his numerous infidelities, Stiva has never even asked himself what Dolly’s reaction might be and what his behavior might mean to her. Should her shock and distress really have been unexpected? If Stiva had bothered to put himself in her place, however briefly, would he have believed that she would find his perspective reasonable? For that matter, if Dolly could overhear her husband’s thoughts, understand how unappealing he finds her, and realize that he regards her arduous life’s work as something trivial (“merely a good mother”), wouldn’t she be even more distressed?
It is, of course, absurd to imagine that Dolly would see the matter as Stiva does. Thus, the irony of the final sentence: “It had turned out quite the other way.” Well, whaddya know! This sentence snaps like a punch line, and makes the whole preceding passage even more humorous, because we clearly hear, along with Stiva’s expression of surprise, the author’s ironic reflection on that surprise.
In the translation by Louise and Aylmer Maude, the double-voicing is only faintly audible. In the next to last sentence, it is crucial to place Dolly’s status as a good mother after the many disparaging descriptions of her, as if it were a sort of minor concession that she does have something going for her, but the Maudes ignore the original and place it before. In the Russian, the punch line is as brief as possible, as punch lines must be: just three words (“Okazalos’ sovsem protivnoe”). The Maudes not only drag it out—“It turned out that the very opposite was the case”—they end it not on what matters, “the other way,” but on the limp “was the case.”44xLeo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, trans. Louise and Aylmer Maude, ed. and rev. George Gibian (New York, NY: Norton, 1970), 2–3. It doesn’t matter that one could defend how each word and phrase is translated by referring to the dictionary, or that “the meaning is accurately” conveyed. What matters, the author’s irony and the humor it produces, gets softened.
When rumors reached Mark Twain that he had died in Europe, he cabled home: “The reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated.” One says that some accusation is “greatly exaggerated” when one has been caught red-handed and can’t deny it, which is why Twain’s line is a lot funnier than, for instance, “The reports of my death are false.” Now imagine someone had given this line as: “Communications regarding my supposed demise distort what is actually the case.” If this were a translation, one might either justify it in terms of meaning or fault it for straying from the original wording, but either reaction would be beside the point. A brilliant witticism is no longer witty.
In recent years, the husband-and-wife team of Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (henceforth referred to as P&V) have retranslated dozens of Russian classics. Their prize-winning versions are the most readily available. But they are a disaster. Years ago, I wrote an article explaining why P&V versions are so bad.55xGary Saul Morson, “The Pevearsion of Russian Literature” Commentary, vol. 130. No. 1 (July/August 2010), 92–98; https://www.commentary.org/articles/gary-morson/the-pevearsion-of-russian-literature/. Since then, other commenters have detected errors I overlooked. Especially insightful are the comments by John McWhorter and by M. Berdy and V. Lanchikov.66xJohn McWhorter, “Pevear and Volokhonsky Are Indeed Overrated: My Two Roubles,” It Bears Mentioning, April 7, 2021, https://johnmcwhorter.substack.com/pevear-and-volokhonsky-are-indeed; M. Berdy and V. Lanchikov, “The Sweet Smell of Success? Russian Classics in the Translation of R. Pevear and L. Volokhonsky,” http://pavelpal.ru/node/311, formerly at http://www.thinkaloud.ru/feature/berdy-lan-PandV-e.html.
P&V are worth examining not only because their versions are so widespread but also because sometimes bad translations can be instructive: If one grasps why they fail, one can better understand how a translation can succeed.
Let me first address the frequent claim that P&V’s versions are more accurate than all others. They are not. Consider a passage from Mikhail Bulgakov’s comic masterpiece, The Master and Margarita. At the end of part one, chapter five, Bezdomny, whom the devil has driven insane, is being sent to Dr. Stravinsky’s hospital for the insane. A cabby offers to take him: “I’ll go fast! I’ve taken guys to the nuthouse before!” (“A vot na begovoi! Ya vozil v psikhicheskuyu!”) That is how the superb version by Diana Burgin and Katherine Tiernan O’Connor render the line.77xMikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita, trans. Diana Burgin and Katherine Tiernan O’Connor (New York, NY: Vintage, 1995), 54. P&V translate: “Have a run for your money! I’ve taken ’em to the psychics before!” Psychics? A psychic is not a madman but a fortuneteller. I cite this absurd error because it illustrates a key reason P&V versions are so bad: Pevear, the team’s native English speaker, has a terrible feel for English.88xMikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (New York, NY: Penguin, 1997), 66.
In his introduction to The Brothers Karamazov, Pevear faults earlier translators who “smoothed over [Dostoevsky’s] idiosyncratic prose, removing much of the…distinctive voicing of the novel.”99xRichard Pevear, introduction, Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov: A Novel in Four Parts with Epilogue, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (New York, NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1990), xi. To restore that distinctive voicing, Pevear would need to appreciate the distinctive tones of English. McWhorter shows he doesn’t by citing a scene in War and Peace in which “a soldier wanders in and says, ‘I’ve strayed from my company, Your Honor; I don’t know where myself.” “Myself as opposed to who?” McWhorter asks. “If [the soldier] has wandered away from the company, why would he suppose anyone other than himself would know just where it happened?” As a linguist, McWhorter explains that, even though Volokhonsky is a native speaker of Russian, the translation misconstrues how Russian works:
This is, quite simply, a translation mistake. P&V are translating from the word sam, which indeed can mean self in Russian. However, here it is used in a more abstract—but very commonly used—meaning, as “even.” What Tolstoy meant here was the perfectly natural “I don’t even know where.” This clicks with Tolstoy’s general point of how random and aimless actual warfare is—the guy doesn’t even quite recall at what point he was officially lost from the company.1010xJohn McWhorter, “Pevear and Volokhonsky Are Indeed Overrated: My Two Roubles.”
McWhorter later cites P&V having a pair of soldiers “pulling some boot from each other,” which follows the Russian word for word but is puzzling in English. What exactly are they doing? In much the same way, P&V have a soldier ask for “some hot little fire for the infantry!” To begin with, McWhorter observes, “‘some hot little fire’ sounds weird for the same reason that ‘cold little water’ would.” What exactly does the soldier want?
In English we don’t ask for “fire”—it sounds German, as in the textbook chestnut “Haben Sie Feuer?” for asking someone for a match or a lighter for your cigarette. In a War and Peace where the characters are speaking the English language, they can’t ask for “fire,” but for some burning object—a torch, or match, or a light.1111xIbid.
To illustrate an especially interesting mistake, McWhorter cites how P&V have Captain Tushin “buttoning his greatcoat and smoothing himself out.” Smoothing himself out? In English, we would say something like “pulled it straight.” The error evidently derives from P&V’s attempt to be as literal as possible. Many verbs in Russian are reflexive: They end in sya, a shortened form of sebya, or “self.” P&V therefore make sure to include the word “self,” as in “smoothing himself out.”
The problem is that the Russian reflexive does not always mean an action upon oneself. In English, we have a few expressions like this, such as “perjure yourself” or “behave yourself!” Russian uses this construction much more often: A Russian doesn’t get angry; he angers himself. He doesn’t smile but smiles himself. Somehow P&V decided that Tushin was “exerting some actual action upon himself. Thus, he has to daintily ‘smooth out’ his coat, patting himself down, caressing his own person, as opposed to what Tolstoy meant, which was that he gave the coat a crisp yank…with the fact that this was done to himself needing no more explicit indication than the fact that perjuring operates upon oneself.”1212xIbid.
P&V seem to have the idea that “giving Anglophones a great Russian novel means giving it to them in a kind of Russian-in-English,” writes McWhorter. “But that’s only cute if you know Russian!” I suspect that Russian literature scholars have praised P&V because they have already experienced these novels as masterpieces and so can be primarily interested in something new, something that imitates Russian syntax and wording. They forget that translations are for readers who don’t know the original language.
Berdy and Lanchikov focus on P&V’s effort to reproduce Russian syntax and word order to convey a great author’s distinctive style. In this way of thinking, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky sound similar to Anglophone readers because they both sound like Constance Garnett. That may be so. The problem lies in trying to reveal individual style by preserving the original’s word order and sentence structure. The result is such oddities as, from the P&V translation of The Master and Margarita: “Not only not to get up, it seemed to him that he could not open his eyes” and “The previous day was thus coming gradually into focus, but right now Styopa was much more interested in today’s day.”
“Not only not to get up”? “Today’s day” (for “segodniashnyi den’”)? In English, one might say: “Not only was it hard to get up, it even seemed hard to open his eyes” and “Yesterday was coming into focus, but right now Styopa was much more interested in today”—or, perhaps, “the previous day was coming into focus, but Styopa was much more interested in this one.”
How can the Anglophone reader who encounters such constructions tell when an odd wording is just how one says it in Russian rather than an author’s stylistic invention? If, as Berdy and Lanchikov write, one “thoughtlessly copies formal elements of the original, one can end up presenting the most mediocre writer of trashy literature as a brilliant stylistic inventor by inadvertently ascribing to him the authorship of phrases and syntactical structures which are commonplace in the original language but sound fresh and unexpected for the readers of the translation.”1313xM. Berdy and V. Lanchikov, “The Sweet Smell of Success?”
To convey an author’s original style, it seems to me, the very opposite procedure is needed. When the author uses Russian idioms or commonplace constructions, the translator should use English idioms and commonplace constructions. Only then can a truly original way of phrasing stand out.
Such errors seem minor compared to the most important one: By focusing on purely formal features, P&V can, and often do, bypass, or even misrepresent, what is crucial. The unnamed narrator of Dostoevsky’s Notes From Underground is concerned above all to refute the prevailing deterministic theory that people always act, and cannot help acting, according to what they consider their best advantage. If so, then people are in principle, and someday in practice, utterly predictable, and real choice is inconceivable. We are nothing but “piano keys” played upon by the laws of nature, and our actions can be tabulated in advance like entries in “tables of logarithms up to 108,000.” But humanness, the underground man insists, entails the ability to behave unpredictably. It lies in the capacity to surprise. To prove his point, the underground man deliberately acts against his best interests. He harms himself—just because, just so, for no reason at all, except to show that one can do so, that he is not just a “piano key or an organ stop.” He calls such self-harm “spite,” and if one does not understand this concept, one fails to understand the book.
“Spite” is the term chosen by Garnett, by Matlaw in his revision of Garnett, and in the versions of Kirsten Lodge and Michael Katz. So far as I know, no one has found any better rendition. Pevear and Volokhonsky, however, chose “wickedness”! And so instead of the famous beginning—“I am a sick man…I am a spiteful man,” we get: “I am a sick man…I am a wicked man.” Now, zloy can mean “wicked,” as well as “spiteful,” but to render the word this way is to obscure the book’s central theme, which is not wickedness but, precisely, spite.
Pevear justifies his choice: “There is, however, one tradition of mistranslation…that raises something more than a question of ‘mere tone.’… Zloy is indeed at the root of the Russian word for ‘spiteful’…but it is a much broader and deeper word, meaning ‘wicked,’ ‘bad,’ ‘evil.’… The translation of zloy as ‘spiteful’ instead of ‘wicked’ is not inevitable, nor is it a matter of nuance. It speaks for the habit of substituting the psychological for the moral, of interpreting a spiritual condition as a kind of behavior, which has so bedeviled our century.”1414xRichard Pevear, introduction, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes From Underground, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (New York, NY: Knopf Doubleday, 2011), xxviii–xxix.
I appreciate that, in this case, Pevear argues in terms of the work’s meaning. All the same, he has obscured the ideas that, from the work’s appearance to the existentialists and anti-utopian thinkers of the twentieth century to the present, have seemed most important and proven so influential. To see the book as yet another story about “wickedness” is to overlook what makes it truly original.
P&V’s version of Karamazov is no less obtuse. Dostoevsky divides the novel into twelve books, which are designed to be read both “horizontally”—in terms of plot—and “vertically,” as a poetic play of symbols and images. Book IV, Nadryvy (“Lacerations” in the Garnett version), explores the deliberate infliction of psychological pain on oneself, which the author likens to a tearing at one’s wounds. We also read about the mad monk Father Ferapont’s quest for holiness by beating and lacerating himself, while Alyosha has his finger bitten to the bone (lacerated) by a schoolboy. When P&V choose “Strains” instead of “Lacerations” for the title of Book IV, they obscure all this.
Still worse is how they render a key moment revealing Ivan’s usually concealed hatred for his father. Fyodor Pavlovich has been teasing Ivan’s pious younger brother, Alyosha, who reveres his memories of his mother, by describing how he used to spit on her holy icon and drive her into fits. At first, the old man doesn’t notice that the description of his mother’s reaction provokes the same fits in Alyosha:
Something very strange happened…. Precisely what he was describing [in Alysoha’s mother] was suddenly repeated with Alyosha. He jumped up from his seat exactly as his mother was said to have done, wrung his hands…shaking all over in [a] hysterical paroxysm of sudden violent, silent weeping. His extraordinary resemblance to his mother particularly impressed the old man.
“Ivan, Ivan! Water, quickly! It’s like her, exactly as she used to be then, his mother. …He’s upset about his mother, his mother,” he muttered to Ivan.
“But she was my mother, too, I believe, his mother. Was she not?” said Ivan, with uncontrolled anger and contempt.1515xFyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, trans. Constance Garnett (New York, NY: Modern Library, 1996), 151.
Ivan hates his father for having abandoned him as a child and then (as with his older brother, Dmitri) completely forgetting him. Now his father implicitly denies his existence yet again by forgetting who his mother is! Ivan’s rage will lead to his unwitting involvement in his father’s murder, the event on which the plot turns. So it is crucial to get this scene right.
But P&V precisely invert the meaning of Ivan’s words: “But my mother, I think, was also his mother, wouldn’t you agree?”1616xFyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, 137–138. P&V have Ivan remind the old man that his mother was also Alyosha’s, rather than that Alyosha’s mother (whom the old man has three times called “his mother”) is also Ivan’s!
The whole weight of the passage allows no other interpretation. Neither do the actual Russian words: “Da vedi’ i moya, ya dumaya, mat’ ego byla.” (Literally: “But she was also mine, I believe, his mother.”) P&V seem to be just trying to reproduce the Russian word order without attending to the meaning, and, as a result, they botch one of the most important lines in the book.
It’s one thing to confuse a psycho with a psychic, but quite another to reverse the meaning of a crucial sentence, as in Karamazov, or to obscure a work’s central concept, as in their version of Notes From Underground. That is why I think readers should never choose a translation by P&V if another exists. Translating great literature entails conveying what makes it great literature in the first place.
Strong Translations of Russian Classics
A List from Gary Saul MorsonIsaac Babel (1894–1940)
The Essential Fictions, trans. Val Vinokur.
The Collected Stories, trans. Walter Morison.Mikhail Bulgakov (1891–1940)
The Master and Margarita, trans. Diana Burgin and Katherine Tiernan O’Connor.Anton Chekhov (1860–1904)
The Major Plays, trans. Ann Dunnigan.
Selected Stories, trans. Ann Dunnigan.
The Greatest Short Stories of Anton Chekhov, trans. Constance Garnett.
Peasants and other stories, trans. Constance Garnett.
The Tales of Chekhov, 13 volumes, trans. Constance Garnett.Nikolai Chernyshevsky (1828–1889)
What Is to Be Done? trans. Michael R. Katz.Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821–1881)
The Brothers Karamazov, trans. Constance Garnett, rev. Susan McReynolds Oddo.
Crime and Punishment, trans. Constance Garnett.
The Idiot, trans. Constance Garnett; Garnett translation as revised by Anna Brailovsky is not recommended.
The Possessed, trans. Constance Garnett; including suppressed chapter.
Notes From Underground/The Grand Inquisitor, trans. Constance Garnett, rev. Ralph E. Matlaw.
A Writer’s Diary, two volumes, trans. Kenneth Lantz.Nikolai Gogol (1809–1852)
Dead Souls, trans. Bernard Guilbert Guerney, rev. Susanne Fusso.
The Nose and Other Stories, trans. Susanne Fusso.
Other translations by Constance Garnett, revised by Leonard J. Kent.Ivan Goncharov (1812–1891)
Oblomov, trans. Ann Dunnigan.
Ordinary Story (The Same Old Story), trans. Constance Garnett.Vasily Grossman (1905–1964)
Stalingrad, trans. Robert and Elizabeth Chandler.
Life and Fate, trans. and intro. Robert Chandler.Alexander Herzen (1812–1870)
My Past and Thoughts, several volumes, trans. Constance Garnett; six volumes from Faber and Faber; abridged version by Dwight McDonald. A new translation by Kathleen Parthé is forthcoming.
A Herzen Reader, ed. and trans. Kathleen Parthé.Boris Pasternak (1890–1960)
Doctor Zhivago, trans. Max Hayward and Manya Harari.Varlam Shalamov (1907–1982)
Kolyma Tales, trans. John Glad.Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918–2008)
Existing versions of The Gulag Archipelago are good.
In the First Circle: The First Uncensored Edition, trans. Harry T. Willets.
The Red Wheel series, trans. Harry T. Willetts, 2014, and trans. Marian Schwartz, 2024–25.
Other titles in translations by Marian Schwartz.
The Solzhenitsyn Reader: New and Essential Writings, 1947–2005, ed. Edward E. Ericson and Daniel J. Mahoney.
We Have Ceased to See the Purpose: Essential Speeches of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, ed. Ignat Solzhenitsyn.Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910)
War and Peace, trans. Ann Dunnigan.
Anna Karenina, trans. Constance Garnett, rev. Leonard J. Kent and Nina Berberova.
Collected Shorter Fiction, two volumes, trans. Aylmer and Louise Maude.Ivan Turgenev (1818–1883)
Virgin Soil, trans. Constance Garnett.
Fathers and Sons, trans. Constance Garnett, rev. Ralph Matlaw.
Numerous additional volumes translated by Garnett.
The Essential Turgenev, ed. Elizabeth Cheresh Allen.