In 1998, he joined the faculty of the American University of Paris (AUP), where he taught courses in Russian literature and translation.
Larissa Volokhonsky (Russian: Лариса Волохонская) was born into a Jewish family in Leningrad, now St. Petersburg, on 1 October 1945.
After graduating from Leningrad State University with a degree in mathematical linguistics, she worked in the Institute of Marine Biology (Vladivostok) and travelled extensively in Sakhalin Island and Kamchatka (1968–1973).
The husband-and-wife team works in a two-step process: Volokhonsky prepares her English version of the original text, trying to follow Russian syntax and stylistic peculiarities as closely as possible, and Pevear turns this version into polished and stylistically appropriate English.
Larissa produces a complete draft, following the original as closely as possible, with many marginal comments and observations.
"[8]Volokhonsky and Pevear were interviewed about the art of translation for Ideas, the long running Canadian Broadcasting Company (CBC) radio documentary.
[9][10] It was the subject of a month-long discussion in the "Reading Room" site of The New York Times Book Review.
Writing in the Los Angeles Times, professor of Slavic languages and translator Michael Henry Heim praised their Fyodor Dostoevsky translations, stating "the reason they have succeeded so well in bringing Dostoevsky into English is not that they have made him sound bumpy or unnatural but that they have managed to capture and differentiate the characters' many voices.
"[14] In 2007, critic James Wood wrote in The New Yorker that their Dostoevsky translations are "justly celebrated" and argued that previous translators of Leo Tolstoy's work had "sidestepp[ed] difficult words, smooth[ed] the rhythm of the Russian, and eliminat[ed] one of Tolstoy's most distinctive elements, repetition," whereas Pevear and Volokhonsky's translation of War and Peace captured the "spirit and order of the book.
Writing in The New York Review of Books in 2016, the critic Janet Malcolm argued that Pevear and Volokhonsky "have established an industry of taking everything they can get their hands on written in Russian and putting it into flat, awkward English".
[17] The Slavic studies scholar Gary Saul Morson has written in Commentary that Pevear and Volokhonsky translations "take glorious works and reduce them to awkward and unsightly muddles".
[18] Criticism has been focused on the excessive literalness of the couple's translations and the perception that they miss the original tone of the authors.
[18] Linguist John McWhorter has also criticized their literalness, adding that, "surprisingly often", they "miss basic nuances of how Russian even works".
[21] Fyodor Dostoevsky Svetlana Alexievich Mikhail Bulgakov Nikolai Gogol Leo Tolstoy Anton Chekhov Mother Maria Skobtsova Boris Pasternak Ivan Turgenev Nikolai Leskov Alexander Pushkin Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin Alain Jose Vincente Ortuño Jacques Mercier Yves Bonnefoy Alberto Savinio Samuil Marshak Sophocles Alexandre Dumas Olga Medvedkova Pevear's book Translating Music (2007) contains his translation of Alexander Pushkin's poem "The Tale of the Preacher and His Man Bumpkin" (Russian: Сказка о попе и о работнике его Балде).