Ann Dunnigan

Translation career and later years After a stint as a speech teacher, her interest in the work of Anton Chekhov led her to study the Russian language. and made it the principal reference for his 1981 adaptation, The Notebook of Trigorin.

Dunnigan's rendering of War and Peace (New American Library, 1968) was the first American English edition of the novel. When WBAI in New York broadcast a live, centennial reading of the translation in 1970, Dunnigan herself joined the performance.

1972 saw the publication of two new editions: Tolstoy's Fables and Fairy Tales (New American Library) and Dostoyevsky's Netochka Nezvanova (Prentice Hall).

In 1976, the New York Shakespeare Festival commissioned Jean-Claude van Itallie to retranslate The Cherry Orchard into English. He provided them with a rendering, and the performance premiered at the Vivian Beaumont Theater in 1977. The New York Post, The New York Times, and The Village Voice praised the adaptation and the production alike; but Dunnigan contested that van Itallie's translation was nearly identical to hers, and sued him. In the settlement that followed, van Itallie accepted responsibility for the legal costs, and agreed to cease promotion of his version. Years later, van Itallie applied himself to new renderings of The Cherry Orchard, The Seagull, Three Sisters, and Uncle Vanya. In the introduction to Applause Books' 1995 compilation of these, van Itallie asserts that he "worked on The Sea Gull, and later the other three plays, with a specially-made literal English translation and a selection of French translations."

Dunnigan's final stage performance was in a staging of Sophocles' Antigone at The Public Theater, for the 1982 New York Shakespeare Festival.

She died in her Manhattan apartment in 1997.

Published translations Anton Chekhov Selected Stories (1960) The Major Plays (1964) Plays and Stories (1965) Ward Six and Other Stories (1965)

Fyodor Dostoyevsky Netochka Nezvanova (1970)

Ivan Goncharov Oblomov (1963)

Ilya Tolstoy Tolstoy, My Father: Reminiscences (1971)

Leo Tolstoy War and Peace (1968) Fables and Fairy Tales (1972)