Daily Reminder That P&V Are A Meme

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"Pevear and Volokhonsky finished “Anna Karenina” in September, 1998—or so they thought. Despite their growing reputation in the United States, they failed to impress the editors at Penguin in London. “They told us the book was unreadable,” Pevear said. “They told us it had to be more ‘reader-friendly.’ But Tolstoy himself is not reader-friendly! They said it was not at a stage to be copy-edited.”

<http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2005/11/07/the-translation-wars>

"Tolstoy notes the susceptibility of his contemporaries to the "charm of obscurity". Works have become laden with "euphemisms, mythological and historical allusions", and general "vagueness, mysteriousness, obscurity and inaccessibility to the masses". Tolstoy lambastes such works, insisting that art can and should be comprehensible to everyone. Having emphasised that art has a function in the improvement of humanity - capable of expressing man’s best sentiment - he finds it offensive that artists should be so wilfully and arrogantly abstruse."

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Is_Art%3F>