TOLSTOY AND GOOD WRITING.

TOLSTOY AND GOOD WRITING. James Wood in the New Yorker is not the only reviewer to contrast Tolstoy’s style with ideas of “good writing.” Orlando Figes in the New York Review of Books for November 22 reviews the new translation of WAR AND PEACE by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky and praises their translations of Dostoevsky, Gogol, Bulgakov, Chekhov, and Tolstoy for “restoring all the characteristic idioms, the bumpy syntax, the angularities, and the repetitions that had largely been removed in the interests of ‘good writing’ by [Constance] Garnett and her followers.” Tolstoy is a great writer, but he does not conform to accepted ideas of “good writing.” Figes says, “Tolstoy’s syntax is unconventional. In War and Peace he frequently ignores the rules of grammar and word order to strengthen an effect or to recreate the looseness of the spoken word—a practice that can make his Russian read quite clumsily at times.” In today’s other post I quoted Wood’s comment that modern copy editors follow Flaubert on repetitions, saying that, “Flaubert, the agonist of style, swatted repetitions like insects.” Tolstoy did not agree with Flaubert. Figes says that “Repetition is perhaps the most distinctive single feature of his style.” Figes cites a passage where Tolstoy uses the same Russian word seven times. Pevear and Volokhonsky translate the word as “wept” all seven times. Three other translators of the passage follow the stricture of “good writing” against repetition, using “wept” three or four times and “cried” three or four times.