Love Them or Hate Them, This Couple Reign in Russian Literature

The first time Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky translated a Russian novel together, it felt as though another man had joined their marriage: Dostoyevsky.

“It was a mariage à trois,” Volokhonsky said over coffee at her and Pevear’s rambling apartment in the 15th arrondissement of Paris. “Dostoyevsky was always in our mind. We just lived with him.”

They were, Pevear recalled, pouring themselves into “The Brothers Karamazov,” Dostoyevsky’s immense final novel. “Well,” Volokhonsky said, “at least we like each other.”

Their translation of “The Brothers Karamazov,” published in 1990, was so well received that a full-page review in The New York Times Book Review declared, “The truth is out at last.” Their edition of the novel, it continued, “finally gets the musical whole of Dostoyevsky’s original.”

Since then, Pevear and Volokhonsky, he now 81 and she 78, have become reigning translators of Russian literature, publishing an average of one volume per year, including classics by Tolstoy and Chekhov, as well as lesser-known books and works by contemporary writers like the Nobel laureate Svetlana Alexievich. In their reach, the couple are the Constance Garnett of our time, making vast swaths of Russia’s written word available to the West, for which they have received both adulation and full-throated condemnation.

Their latest project is a translation of Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin’s “Foolsburg: The History of a Town,” published earlier this month by Vintage. To Anglophone readers, to whom the book is largely unknown, it will be a corrective to the only previous translation available, from 1980, as well as an argument for the book’s Swiftian wit and its relevance to Russia and the United States today. There is even a character in it named Trump.