At the end of our last conversation in Paris, Pevear went to his shelves and pulled down a volume in French, and read a prayer by Larbaud addressed to St. Jerome, who translated the Bible into Latin. Following the line with his finger, Pevear squinted and, slowly, translated: “Excellent Doctor, Light of the Holy Church, Blessed Jerome. I am about to undertake a task full of difficulties, and from this moment on I beg of you to help me with your prayers so I can translate this work into French with the same spirit with which it was composed.”

Pevear, especially, has read some of the theory about translation: Walter Benjamin, José Ortega y Gasset, Roman Jakobson, and, of course, Nabokov.

Finally, in 2000, the book was published in the U.K. Penguin sold a few hundred copies in England. At Viking-Penguin in New York, Caroline White, a senior editor, ordered a print run of thirty-two thousand, with the hope that some strong reviews would mean that the new edition would displace Garnett, the Maudes, and other translations on the academic market.

He takes banal people and puts them into banal situations, but he has hope for them.

But Tolstoy himself said the point is to get the thing said and then, if he wasn’t sure he had said it, he would say it again and again.”