War and Peace (Pevear/Volokhonsky Translation) Leo Tolstoy
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group

Very light too, after you get past the blizzard of names (this will help though): but read the Maude or Pevear-Volokhonsky translations — others (especially the new Penguin one) are dreadful. This quote sits atop the introduction to the new Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky translation of Boris Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago, and reflects what I have found to be most appealing about the novel - the often elegant nineteenth- century historical novel about the Russian revolution, an epic along the lines of War and Peace" or "a moving love story, or the lyrical biography of a poet, setting the sensitive individual against the grim realities of Soviet life. What War and Peace is, I suppose, it the biggest and baddest attempt at experimental/historical fiction ever attempted. I'm curious as to why the other bloggers you follow(ed) weren't pleased with the translation. "As long as 'War and Peace' " is a comparison understood even by people who have never cracked its covers. Tin Drum by Günter Grass, translated from the German by Breon Mitchell (here); and James Woods' review of War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy, translated from the Russian by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (here). I have read Crime and Punishment, The Brothers Karamazov, and The Idiot, each translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. War and Peace especially is a transformation and revelation. I have been thinking about adding Dumas to the Classics Challenge, and I might have to try the Pevear translation. I've seen other sites do similar things with Pevear and Volokhonsky's War and Peace translation.