A Month in the Country

Book excerpt: "Pevear and Volokhonsky are at once scrupulous translators and vivid stylists of English." - James Wood, New Yorker A week before her thirtieth birthday, Natlya's life as a dutiful wife and mother is upended as the arrival of her son's charming new tutor unleashes a whirlwind of suppressed emotions in her peaceful household. "I set myself quite a complicated psychological task in this comedy," Turgenev wrote of the play, which would go on to become one of the permanent works in the Russian dramatic repertory. This fresh translation of A Month in the Country is a collaboration between renowned playwright Richard Nelson and the foremost contemporary translators of classic Russian literature Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. It marks the second in TCG's Classic Russian Drama Series, which plans over the next ten years to publish new translations of major works of Russian drama. Richard Nelson's many plays include The Apple Family: Scenes from Life in the Country (That Hopey Changey Thing, Sweet and Sad, Sorry and Regular Singing); Nikolai and the Others; Goodnight Children Everywhere (Olivier Award for Best Play); Franny's Way; Some Americans Abroad; Frank's Home; Two Shakespearean Actors and James Joyce's The Dead (with Shaun Davey; Tony Award for Best Book of a Musical). Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky have translated the works of Leo Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Nikolai Gogol, Anton Chekhov, Boris Pasternak and Mikhail Bulgakov. Their translations of The Brothers Karamozov and Anna Karenina won the PEN Translation Prize in 1991 and 2002, respectively. Pevear, a native of Boston, and Volokhonsky, of St. Petersburg, are married and live in France.