Yalom Editorial Team

Open War and Peace in any edition and the first words of dialogue are Anna Pavlovna Scherer’s, and they are in French. Tolstoy did this on purpose: the Petersburg aristocracy of 1805 thought and gossiped in French and used Russian for servants. The editions diverge immediately. Pevear and Volokhonsky print the French on the page […]

Take the opening pages of Crime and Punishment, where Raskolnikov leaves his room and walks toward the pawnbroker’s flat. In Garnett the paragraph reads as one smooth sentence of Edwardian narration: the young man goes out, he is nervous, the heat is oppressive. In Pevear and Volokhonsky the same paragraph keeps Dostoevsky’s stops and restarts. […]