Richard Pevear - translator has 5 audiobooks on Listento.it, narrated by 6 narrators, with an average listener rating of 4.6★ across 43 ratings. The most-rated is The Unwomanly Face of War.
The Unwomanly Face of War
Summary
A long-awaited English translation of the groundbreaking oral history of women in World War II across Europe and Russia - from the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature “A landmark.” (Timothy Snyder, author of On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century) For more than three decades, Svetlana Alexievich has been the memory and conscience of the twentieth century. When the Swedish Academy awarded her the Nobel Prize, it cited her invention of “a new kind of literary genre,” describing her work as “a history of emotions...a history of the soul.” In The Unwomanly Face of War, Alexievich chronicles the experiences of the Soviet women who fought on the front lines, on the home front, and in the occupied territories. These women - more than a million in total - were nurses and doctors, pilots, tank drivers, machine-gunners, and snipers. They battled alongside men, and yet, after the victory, their efforts and sacrifices were forgotten. Alexievich traveled thousands of miles and visited more than a hundred towns to record these women’s stories. Together, this symphony of voices reveals a different aspect of the war - the everyday details of life in combat left out of the official histories. Translated by the renowned Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, The Unwomanly Face of War is a powerful and poignant account of the central conflict of the 20th century, a kaleidoscopic portrait of the human side of war. “But why? I asked myself more than once. Why, having stood up for and held their own place in a once absolutely male world, have women not stood up for their history? Their words and feelings? They did not believe themselves. A whole world is hidden from us. Their war remains unknown...I want to write the history of that war. A women’s history.” (Svetlana Alexievich) Read by Julia Emelin, Yelena Shmulenson, Allen Lewis Rickman, and Alan Winter THE WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE “[F]or her polyphonic writings, a monument to suffering and courage in our time.” “A mighty documentarian and a mighty artist... Her books are woven from hundreds of interviews, in a hybrid form of reportage and oral history that has the quality of a documentary film on paper. But Alexievich is anything but a simple recorder and transcriber of found voices; she has a writerly voice of her own which emerges from the chorus she assembles, with great style and authority, and she shapes her investigations of Soviet and post-Soviet life and death into epic dramatic chronicles as universally essential as Greek tragedies.” (The New Yorker)
©2017 Svetlana Alexievich (P)2017 Random House Audio
Fifty-Two Stories
Summary
From the celebrated, award-winning translators of Anna Karenina and War and Peace: a lavish, masterfully rendered volume of stories by one of the most influential short fiction writers of all time. Chekhov's genius left an indelible impact on every literary form in which he wrote, but none more so than short fiction. Now, renowned translators and longtime house authors Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky give us their peerless renderings of 52 Chekhov stories - a full deck! These stories, which span the full arc of his career, reveal the extraordinary variety and unexpectedness of his work, from the farcically comic to the darkly complex, showing that there is no one type of "Chekhov story". They are populated by a remarkable range of characters who come from all parts of Russia, all walks of life, and who, taken together, have democratized the short story. Included here are a number of never-before-translated stories, including "Reading" and "An Educated Blockhead". Here is a collection that promises profound delight.
©2020 Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (P)2020 Random House Audio
The Enchanted Wanderer
Summary
Written over the course of Leskov's career, each story in The Enchanted Wanderer elucidates the very essence of the human condition; themes of love, despair, loneliness, and revenge are explored against the backdrop of 19th-century working-class Russia. Leskov deftly layers social satire and subtle criticism atop myth and fable, resulting in a richly entertaining collection.
©2013 Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (P)2019 Tantor
The Double and The Gambler
Summary
The Double, written in Dostoevsky's youth, was a sharp turn away from the realism of his first novel, Poor Folk. The first real expression of his genius, The Double is a surprisingly modern hallucinatory nightmare in which a minor official named Goliadkin becomes aware of a mysterious doppelgänger - a man who has his name and his face and who gradually and relentlessly begins to displace him with his friends and colleagues. In the dilemma of this increasingly paranoid hero, Dostoevsky makes vividly concrete the inner disintegration of consciousness that would become a major theme of his work. The Gambler was written 20 years later, under the pressure of crushing debt. It is a stunning psychological portrait of a young man's exhilarating and destructive addiction, a compulsion that Dostoevsky - who once gambled away his young wife's wedding ring - knew intimately from his own experience. In the disastrous love affairs and gambling adventures of his character, Alexei Ivanovich, Dostoevsky explores the irresistible temptation to look into the abyss of ultimate risk that he believed was an essential part of the Russian national character. The two strikingly original short novels brought together here - in new translations by award-winning translators - were both literary gambles of a sort for Dostoevsky.
©2005 Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (P)2019 Tantor
The Adolescent
Summary
The narrator and protagonist of Dostoevsky's novel The Adolescent (first published in English as A Raw Youth) is Arkady Dolgoruky, a naive 19-year-old boy bursting with ambition and opinions. The illegitimate son of a dissipated landowner, he is torn between his desire to expose his father's wrongdoing and the desire to win his love. He travels to St. Petersburg to confront the father he barely knows, inspired by an inchoate dream of communion and armed with a mysterious document that he believes gives him power over others. This new English version by the most acclaimed of Dostoevsky's translators is a masterpiece of pathos and high comedy.
©2013 Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (P)2019 Tantor