Pevear spoke readily, and with confidence, about Tolstoy’s language. He said that the hardest part of starting a long project like Anna Karenina was “getting the voice,” capturing the narrative tone that will run throughout the book.
“Tolstoy’s style is the least interesting thing about him, though it is very peculiar,” he said. “It seems like most, translators included, are insensible to the crudeness of Tolstoy’s style, but Tolstoy liked to be crude, for he was crude provocatively. Anna Karenina is interesting very often for how the prose is deliberately not smooth or fine. Nabokov apologizes for Tolstoy’s bad writing.”
“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.” (Remnick, David Reporting Knopf Doubleday, 2007. Print.)