The present new translation of Tolstóy has the following distinctive features:
The translator was born and educated in Russia, and the scenes and the life depicted, and the ideas evolved by the author, are familiar to him as to a native; on the other hand, his later youth and his manhood have been passed in America, where for twenty years he has taken active part in the educational and the literary movements of Anglo-Saxon life. Thus he is enabled correctly to interpret the workings of the greatest Russian mind both from the standpoint of a Russian and of an American. Still further to ensure literary accuracy, all the manuscript has been read by Miss Carrie A. Harper, herself an English authoress, whose advice has been invaluable to him.
The translator has treated the author with sympathetic love, which in many instances is due to a common bond of practices of life and of ideas: the translator is a vegetarian and teetotaler of even longer standing than the author, and shares his educational ideas both in theory and in practice. At the same time, the translator is absolutely free from any personal bias, and in dealing with Tolstóy brings to bear a critical spirit, born of the blending of the Russian and the Anglo-Saxon concepts of life.
No liberties are taken with either the language or the expression of the author’s diction, which in unconscious artistic moments is sublimely poetical and sonorous, and
