Comment

Dec 09, 2018
War and Peace deserves its place in the pantheon of the world's greatest books. This translation (Pevear and Volkhonsky) does not. It is an attempt to make the language more modern than it is in the classic Maude version. So we have Russian officers yelling the very American, present day command "Ten - HUT" on the battlefield, instead of "attention". A sabre in the hands of a Russian hussar becomes just a sword. In the Maude version someone who bows obsequiously becomes someone who simply bows. A new adjutant "turns red" instead of "... with a flushed face....". In short, this version strips away much of the 19th century charm of Tolstoy's style. It modernises (and in many places dumbs down) some vocabulary and sentence structure in jarring, odd ways. The Maude version remains by far the best. It was done in Tolstoy's lifetime, and he gave it his approval.