![]() ![]() To evoke the world of half a century earlier, he visited the Borodino battlefield and drew prototypes for his characters from his own family. Tolstoy spent the better part of the 1860s drafting and redrafting his panoramic family chronicle of Russia during the Napoleonic wars. Hailed for their work on Fyodor Dostoevsky and others, the prolific husband-and-wife team takes pains to preserve Tolstoy's stylistic idiosyncrasies and French dialogue (estimated by Pevear at 2 percent of the original). Readers familiar with Tolstoy's longest novel will find much that is new in Pevear and Volokhonsky's translation. Publishers took note: This fall, two translations of Tolstoy's "War and Peace" have emerged - each particular in its own way. Leo Tolstoy's comment that "each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way" struck a best-selling chord with talk-show audiences across America when Oprah Winfrey assigned Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky's translation of "Anna Karenina" to her book club in 2004. ![]()
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