LIVE from NYPL: RICHARD PEVEAR & LARISSA VOLOKHONSKY in conversation with Keith Gessen: Celebrating a New Translation of War and Peace
After their translation of Tolstoi's Anna Karenina, comes this new translation of War and Peace. Together, Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky have translated The Collected Tales by Nikolai Gogol, The Complete Short Novels of Chekhov, and The Brothers Karamazov along with many other works by Fyodor Dostoevsky.
photos of Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky by Brigitte Lacombe
About Richard Pevear
Richard Pevear has published translations of Alain, Yves Bonnefoy, Alberto Savinio, Pavel Florensky, and Henri Volohonsky, as well as two books of poetry. He has received fellowships or grants for translation from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Ingram Merrill Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the French Ministry of Culture.
About Larissa Volokhonsky
Larissa Volokhonsky was born in Leningrad. She has translated works by the prominent Orthodox theologians Alexander Schmemann and John Meyendorff into Russian.
Together, Pevear and Volokhonsky have translated Dead Souls and The Collected Tales by Nikolai Gogol, The Complete Short Novels of Chekhov, and The Brothers Karamazov, Crime and Punishment, Notes from Underground, Demons, The Idiot, and The Adolescent by Fyodor Dostoevsky. They were twice awarded the PEN Book-of-the-Month Club Translation Prize for their version of Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov and for Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, and their translation of Dostoevsky's Demons was one of three nominees for the same prize. They are married and live in France.
About Keith Gessen
Keith Gessen is a fiction writer, critic, and translator. His translation of Voices from Chernobyl won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction in 2005. His translation of Lyudmila Petrushevskaya's scary fairy tales will be published in early 2009. He has written about Russian literature and culture for the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books. He is also one of the founding editors of the literary magazine n+1.