I liked Western novels better because of the bitches in them

When I was left home alone, I would put on my mother’s dress and heels and sit on the couch reading Anna Karenina. Society balls, servants, aiguillettes...romantic trysts...I liked everything up to the part when Anna throws herself under the train: What did she do that for? She was beautiful and rich...for love? Not even Tolstoy could convince me...I liked Western novels better because of the bitches in them, the beautiful bitches that men would shoot themselves over and suffer for. Fall at their feet. The last time I cried over unrequited love was when I was seventeen—I spent the whole night in the bathroom with the tap running. My mother consoled me with poems by Pasternak

S. Alexievich, tr. B. Shayevich, Second-hand time (2013), 499

Since French was a foreign language for the Russian reader, it is arguable that every translation should keep those sentences in French. Yet none does.

To take a famous example, the opening lines of War and Peace in the original are: 'Eh bien, mon prince' followed by long passages in French spoken by Russians as if it were their normal everyday language. the characters in question are aristocrats who converse with one another in French for reasons of fashion and snobbery - something the linking text (in Russia) makes clear   Ironically the discussion is about the possible invasion of Russia by Napoleon and 'toutes les atrocites de cet Antichrist.'  Since French was a foreign language for the Russian reader, it is arguable that every translation  should keep those sentences in French. Yet none does.

 J. Erdal, Ghosting: a double life (2004), 85-6

The novelist who sermonises about the ‘swarmlike’ life of men is the novelist who, by and large, never writes about ordinary people

There are large contradictions here. One is that the great historiographical sceptic is also the great sermonising bully, not only telling us what we must think, but clearly writing a form of history … Second the novelist who sermonises about the ‘swarmlike’ life of men is the novelist who, by and large, never writes about ordinary people. Thirdly, theologically speaking War and Peace, for all its radical unconventionality, looks more and more like that characteristically vague growl of nineteenth-century doubt, in which God is no longer describable but impossible to abandon.

J. Wood, The fun stuff  (2013), 152