Yes, an awful cliché: Dostoevsky made me a Christian (kinda). Plus a vision of Christianity that has had an enormous impact on my intellectual life to this day. I didn’t cry, but found myself in an almost entirely incomprehensible world of droshkys and samovars and elders and scandals during visits to salons involving the rupture of social norms I didn’t quite grasp… This world was as different from mine as any chapter in Telluria. The set that I was most attracted to was the five Vintage paperback editions of Dostoevsky’s long novels and, having been given three of the five, I first read The Brothers Karamazov when I was 13, excited to see why it always made Michel Houellebecq cry when he came to the last chapter (yes, I did read The Elementary Particles much too early). And so, alas, my first introduction to Russian literature was by way of new translations seen on shelves of Barnes & Nobles in the suburban Midwest-–seen and sometimes purchased. It would be many years before I’d finish all of them. Then, thinking P+V were the way to read these books I’d been abstractly entranced by the objective manifestations of, I made it a habit to ask for their translations of Russian classics at all birthdays and Christmases. And, in the second, I think the flowers against the lady’s bare thighs, plus the book’s deckle-edged paper, were what made an impression. Still, I never bothered to open the thing. ‘What a mysterious object,’ I thought in the first case, knowing someone murdered an old woman with an axe in it and remembering Gromit reading some canine version of the novel in A Close Shave. The main actor’s girlfriend reading a copy of the famous Pevear and Volokhonsky translation of Anna Karenina (Oprah’s Book Club sticker intact) in the audience of my mom’s play in Chicago in about 2003. An old book from the Suttons Bay Library (where my dad grew up in Michigan) that had been sold off after being DISCARDed (as was stamped in big letters on its first page). Looked like a Chuck Close collage in my memory, but turns out to have been a painting by Seymour Chwast. My dad’s old copy of Crime and Punishment with a face that looked like a composite of many illegible photographs––what was ostensibly Raskolnikov’s visage––on the cover. Max Lawton: It would be nice to claim that my desire to read Russian literature stemmed from something organic or intellectual, but I first encountered Russian literature as physical objects. The Untranslated: What was your relationship with Russian literature before you learnt the language and how has it changed since you started to read it in the original?

Let this interview read like a document from another era when literature still held priority in our minds. All the updates that you need are in Vladimir Sorokin’s withering indictment of Putin translated by Max for The Guardian. At first, I thought about updating our exchange considering the present situation but then decided to leave it as it is. If we were talking now, this conversation would definitely be different.

We finished this interview a month ago when even in the worst nightmare I could not have conceived that the deranged Kremlin dictator would launch an open, full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

Russian to english translator speaking