![devil in me gary and his demons song devil in me gary and his demons song](https://images.saymedia-content.com/.image/ar_4:3%2Cc_fill%2Ccs_srgb%2Cq_auto:eco%2Cw_1200/MTc0MDQ2MDg1ODIyNTU1NzE0/songs-with-angels-from-the-poprock-genres.png)
Over time, in the case of a few major works, better versions were produced. Her greatest virtues were her profound and sympathetic understanding of the works themselves and a literary artist’s feel for the English language. Students once encountered the great Russian writers as rendered by the magnificent Constance Garnett, a Victorian who taught herself the language and then proceeded to introduce almost the entire corpus of Russian literature to the English language over the space of 40 years, from the 1890s to the 1930s. What results from this attempt at unprecedented fidelity is a word-for-word and syntax-for-syntax version that sacrifices tone and misconstrues overall sense. He, who knows insufficient Russian, then works on the rendering with the intention of keeping the language as close to the original as possible. She, a native Russian speaker, renders each book into entirely literal English. Pevear and Volokhonsky, who are married, work in an unusual fashion. But since the P&V editions have begun to appear, students-who have no experience that would allow them to recognize the difference a translation can make-have wondered aloud to me why their peers using those versions in other classes seem to be reading something entirely different. Often enough, they have reported that they have become so absorbed in the psychology and ethical dilemmas of the characters that their way of looking at life itself has changed-a reaction that accords with the peculiar and astonishing urgency unique to Russian literature. When I teach Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, I want students to appreciate and not just take on faith why their works are supreme accomplishments. It looks as ifpeople will be reading P&V, as they have come to be called, for decades to come.
![devil in me gary and his demons song devil in me gary and his demons song](https://brill.com/view/journals/chrc/101/4/18712428_101_04_s001_i0001.png)
The Pevear-Volokhonsky versions of Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Gogol, Chekhov, and Bulgakov have earned rapturous reviews by James Wood in the New Yorker and Orlando Figes in the New York Review of Books, along with a PEN translation award. These are Potemkin translations-apparently definitive but actually flat and fake on closer inspection. Thus it is with the celebrated work of Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, who are making a decades-long project of presenting authoritative new English editions of the great works of Russian literature.
![devil in me gary and his demons song devil in me gary and his demons song](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/OET8SVAGELA/maxresdefault.jpg)
Ever since, the phrase “Potemkin village” has indicated something that looks authentic and impressive-until one examines it closely and discovers its falsity. So he had the pasteboard facade of houses constructed along the road just far enough away to look real. Legend has it that Grigory Potemkin, the chief minister and lover of Catherine the Great, decided to impress her with the prosperity of lands newly conquered by the Russian Empire.