Fathers and Sons — Chapter I

On the eve of the emancipation of the serfs, Nikolai Petrovich waits at a coaching inn for his son Arkady to come home from the university — and Arkady arrives with a friend. This is the first chapter of Ottsy i deti (Fathers and Sons, 1862) in a new translation, produced as spoken audio: the literal and grammatical drafts settled into a smooth English reading and then given a voice.

It follows the same method as our reading editions: a language model produces a strict word-for-word draft and a grammatical draft, and a human settles the smooth English — consulting earlier public-domain translations of the novel where they exist — before the text is read aloud. More chapters, and more voices, are on their way.