Svetlana Geier, the German Dostoyevsky translator, is/was much more famous/uncontested. They even made an excellent movie about her: “The Woman With the 5 Elephants”.
> "The Pevear-Volokhonsky versions of Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Gogol, Chekhov, and Bulgakov have earned rapturous reviews by James Wood in the New Yorker and Orlando Figes in the New York Review of Books, along with a PEN translation award. It looks as if people will be reading P&V, as they have come to be called, for decades to come.
> This is a tragedy, because their translations take glorious works and reduce them to awkward and unsightly muddles. Professional writers have asked me to check the Russian texts because they could not believe any great author would have written what P&V produce."
https://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/20/movies/dostoyevsky-transl...
Regarding P&V:
> "The Pevear-Volokhonsky versions of Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Gogol, Chekhov, and Bulgakov have earned rapturous reviews by James Wood in the New Yorker and Orlando Figes in the New York Review of Books, along with a PEN translation award. It looks as if people will be reading P&V, as they have come to be called, for decades to come.
> This is a tragedy, because their translations take glorious works and reduce them to awkward and unsightly muddles. Professional writers have asked me to check the Russian texts because they could not believe any great author would have written what P&V produce."
https://www.commentary.org/articles/gary-morson/the-pevearsi...