Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky

For Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, translating together extended naturally from their relationship as husband and wife. Now, it is their life’s work.

The first time Pevear, 81, and Volokhonsky, 78, translated a Russian novel together, it felt as though another man had joined their marriage: Dostoyevsky.
“It was a mariage à trois,” Volokhonsky said. “Dostoyevsky was always in our mind. We just lived with him.”

Since that first translation published in 1990 — it was “The Brothers Karamazov,” Dostoyevsky’s immense final novel — Pevear and Volokhonsky have become reigning translators of Russian literature, publishing an average of one volume per year. Their work includes 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 making vast swaths of Russia’s written word available to the West, for which they have received both adulation and full-throated condemnation. Instagram New York Times