Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
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Anna Karenina

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Leo Tolstoy

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4.6

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1,713 ratings


The must-have Pevear and Volokhonsky translation of one of the greatest Russian novels ever written

Described by William Faulkner as the best novel ever written and by Fyodor Dostoevsky as “flawless,” Anna Karenina tells of the doomed love affair between the sensuous and rebellious Anna and the dashing officer, Count Vronsky. Tragedy unfolds as Anna rejects her passionless marriage and thereby exposes herself to the hypocrisies of society. Set against a vast and richly textured canvas of nineteenth-century Russia, the novel's seven major characters create a dynamic imbalance, playing out the contrasts of city and country life and all the variations on love and family happiness.

While previous versions have softened the robust and sometimes shocking qualities of Tolstoy's writing, Pevear and Volokhonsky have produced a translation true to his powerful voice. This authoritative edition, which received the PEN Translation Prize and was an Oprah Book Club™ selection, also includes an illuminating introduction and explanatory notes. Beautiful, vigorous, and eminently readable, this Anna Karenina will be the definitive text for fans of the film and generations to come. This Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition also features French flaps and deckle-edged paper.

For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

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ISBN-10

0143035002

ISBN-13

978-0143035008

Print length

864 pages

Language

English

Publisher

Penguin Classics

Publication date

April 30, 2004

Dimensions

8.35 x 5.67 x 2.01 inches

Item weight

1.54 pounds


Popular highlights in this book

  • Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

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  • There was no solution, but that universal solution which life gives to all questions, even the most complex and insoluble. That answer is: one must live in the needs of the day-that is, forget oneself.

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  • He walked down, for a long while avoiding looking at her as at the sun, but seeing her, as one does the sun, without looking.

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Editorial reviews

“I finally finished Anna Karenina recently, in a translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. I think I can say without controversy that it’s a great book.” —Sally Rooney, The New York Times Book Review


Sample

PART ONE

Chapter 1

Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

Everything was in confusion in the Oblonskys’ house. The wife had discovered that the husband was carrying on an intrigue with a French girl, who had been a governess in their family, and she had announced to her husband that she could not go on living in the same house with him. This position of affairs had now lasted three days, and not only the husband and wife themselves, but all the members of their family and household, were painfully conscious of it. Every person in the house felt that there was no sense in their living together, and that the stray people brought together by chance in any inn had more in common with one another than they, the members of the family and household of the Oblonskys. The wife did not leave her own room, the husband had not been at home for three days. The children ran wild all over the house; the English governess quarreled with the housekeeper, and wrote to a friend asking her to look out for a new situation for her; the man-cook had walked off the day before just at dinner time; the kitchen-maid, and the coachman had given warning.

Three days after the quarrel, Prince Stepan Arkadyevitch Oblonsky-Stiva, as he was called in the fashionable world-woke up at his usual hour, that is, at eight o’clock in the morning, not in his wife’s bedroom, but on the leather-covered sofa in his study. He turned over his stout, well-cared-for person on the springy sofa, as though he would sink into a long sleep again; he vigorously embraced the pillow on the other side and buried his face in it; but all at once he jumped up, sat up on the sofa, and opened his eyes.

“Yes, yes, how was it now?” he thought, going over his dream. “Now, how was it? To be sure! Alabin was giving a dinner at Darmstadt; no, not Darmstadt, but something American. Yes, but then, Darmstadt was in America. Yes, Alabin was giving a dinner on glass tables, and the tables sang, Il mio tesoro-not Il mio tesorothough, but something better, and there were some sort of little decanters on the table, and they were women, too,” he remembered.

Stepan Arkadyevitch’s eyes twinkled gaily, and he pondered with a smile. “Yes, it was nice, very nice. There was a great deal more that was delightful, only there’s no putting it into words, or even expressing it in one’s thoughts awake.” And noticing a gleam of light peeping in beside one of the serge curtains, he cheerfully dropped his feet over the edge of the sofa, and felt about with them for his slippers, a present on his last birthday, worked for him by his wife on gold-colored morocco. And, as he had done every day for the last nine years, he stretched out his hand, without getting up, towards the place where his dressing-gown always hung in his bedroom. And thereupon he suddenly remembered that he was not sleeping in his wife’s room, but in his study, and why: the smile vanished from his face, he knitted his brows.

“Ah, ah, ah! Oo!...” he muttered, recalling everything that had happened. And again every detail of his quarrel with his wife was present to his imagination, all the hopelessness of his position, and worst of all, his own fault.

“Yes, she won’t forgive me, and she can’t forgive me. And the most awful thing about it is that it’s all my fault-all my fault, though I’m not to blame. That’s the point of the whole situation,” he reflected. “Oh, oh, oh!” he kept repeating in despair, as he remembered the acutely painful sensations caused him by this quarrel.

Most unpleasant of all was the first minute when, on coming, happy and good-humored, from the theater, with a huge pear in his hand for his wife, he had not found his wife in the drawing-room, to his surprise had not found her in the study either, and saw her at last in her bedroom with the unlucky letter that revealed everything in her hand.

She, his Dolly, forever fussing and worrying over household details, and limited in her ideas, as he considered, was sitting perfectly still with the letter in her hand, looking at him with an expression of horror, despair, and indignation.

“What’s this? this?” she asked, pointing to the letter.

And at this recollection, Stepan Arkadyevitch, as is so often the case, was not so much annoyed at the fact itself as at the way in which he had met his wife’s words.

There happened to him at that instant what does happen to people when they are unexpectedly caught in something very disgraceful. He did not succeed in adapting his face to the position in which he was placed towards his wife by the discovery of his fault. Instead of being hurt, denying, defending himself, begging forgiveness, instead of remaining indifferent even-anything would have been better than what he did do-his face utterly involuntarily (reflex spinal action, reflected Stepan Arkadyevitch, who was fond of physiology)-utterly involuntarily assumed its habitual, good-humored, and therefore idiotic smile.

This idiotic smile he could not forgive himself. Catching sight of that smile, Dolly shuddered as though at physical pain, broke out with her characteristic heat into a flood of cruel words, and rushed out of the room. Since then she had refused to see her husband.

“It’s that idiotic smile that’s to blame for it all,” thought Stepan Arkadyevitch.

“But what’s to be done? What’s to be done?” he said to himself in despair, and found no answer.

Chapter 2

Stepan Arkadyevitch was a truthful man in his relations with himself. He was incapable of deceiving himself and persuading himself that he repented of his conduct. He could not at this date repent of the fact that he, a handsome, susceptible man of thirty-four, was not in love with his wife, the mother of five living and two dead children, and only a year younger than himself. All he repented of was that he had not succeeded better in hiding it from his wife. But he felt all the difficulty of his position and was sorry for his wife, his children, and himself. Possibly he might have managed to conceal his sins better from his wife if he had anticipated that the knowledge of them would have had such an effect on her. He had never clearly thought out the subject, but he had vaguely conceived that his wife must long ago have suspected him of being unfaithful to her, and shut her eyes to the fact. He had even supposed that she, a worn-out woman no longer young or good-looking, and in no way remarkable or interesting, merely a good mother, ought from a sense of fairness to take an indulgent view. It had turned out quite the other way.

“Oh, it’s awful! oh dear, oh dear! awful!” Stepan Arkadyevitch kept repeating to himself, and he could think of nothing to be done. “And how well things were going up till now! how well we got on! She was contented and happy in her children; I never interfered with her in anything; I let her manage the children and the house just as she liked. It’s true it’s bad her having been a governess in our house. That’s bad! There’s something common, vulgar, in flirting with one’s governess. But what a governess!” (He vividly recalled the roguish black eyes of Mlle. Roland and her smile.) “But after all, while she was in the house, I kept myself in hand. And the worst of it all is that she’s already ... it seems as if ill-luck would have it so! Oh, oh! But what, what is to be done?”

There was no solution, but that universal solution which life gives to all questions, even the most complex and insoluble. That answer is: one must live in the needs of the day-that is, forget oneself. To forget himself in sleep was impossible now, at least till nighttime; he could not go back now to the music sung by the decanter-women; so he must forget himself in the dream of daily life.

“Then we shall see,” Stepan Arkadyevitch said to himself, and getting up he put on a gray dressing-gown lined with blue silk, tied the tassels in a knot, and, drawing a deep breath of air into his broad, bare chest, he walked to the window with his usual confident step, turning out his feet that carried his full frame so easily. He pulled up the blind and rang the bell loudly. It was at once answered by the appearance of an old friend, his valet, Matvey, carrying his clothes, his boots, and a telegram. Matvey was followed by the barber with all the necessaries for shaving.

“Are there any papers from the office?” asked Stepan Arkadyevitch, taking the telegram and seating himself at the looking-glass.

“On the table,” replied Matvey, glancing with inquiring sympathy at his master; and, after a short pause, he added with a sly smile, “They’ve sent from the carriage-jobbers.”

Stepan Arkadyevitch made no reply, he merely glanced at Matvey in the looking-glass. In the glance, in which their eyes met in the looking-glass, it was clear that they understood one another. Stepan Arkadyevitch’s eyes asked: “Why do you tell me that? don’t you know?”

Matvey put his hands in his jacket pockets, thrust out one leg, and gazed silently, good-humoredly, with a faint smile, at his master.

“I told them to come on Sunday, and till then not to trouble you or themselves for nothing,” he said. He had obviously prepared the sentence beforehand.

Stepan Arkadyevitch saw Matvey wanted to make a joke and attract attention to himself. Tearing open the telegram, he read it through, guessing at the words, misspelt as they always are in telegrams, and his face brightened.

“Matvey, my sister Anna Arkadyevna will be here tomorrow,” he said, checking for a minute the sleek, plump hand of the barber, cutting a pink path through his long, curly whiskers.

“Thank God!” said Matvey, showing by this response that he, like his master, realized the significance of this arrival-that is, that Anna Arkadyevna, the sister he was so fond of, might bring about a reconciliation between husband and wife.

“Alone, or with her husband?” inquired Matvey.

Stepan Arkadyevitch could not answer, as the barber was at work on his upper lip, and he raised one finger. Matvey nodded at the looking-glass.

“Alone. Is the room to be got ready upstairs?”

“Inform Darya Alexandrovna: where she orders.”

“Darya Alexandrovna?” Matvey repeated, as though in doubt.

“Yes, inform her. Here, take the telegram; give it to her, and then do what she tells you.”

“You want to try it on,” Matvey understood, but he only said, “Yes sir.”

Stepan Arkadyevitch was already washed and combed and ready to be dressed, when Matvey, stepping deliberately in his creaky boots, came back into the room with the telegram in his hand. The barber had gone.

“Darya Alexandrovna told me to inform you that she is going away. Let him do-that is you-do as he likes,” he said, laughing only with his eyes, and putting his hands in his pockets, he watched his master with his head on one side. Stepan Arkadyevitch was silent a minute. Then a good-humored and rather pitiful smile showed itself on his handsome face.

“Eh, Matvey?” he said, shaking his head.

“It’s all right, sir; she will come round,” said Matvey.

“Come round?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Do you think so? Who’s there?” asked Stepan Arkadyevitch, hearing the rustle of a woman’s dress at the door.

“It’s I,” said a firm, pleasant, woman’s voice, and the stern, pockmarked face of Matrona Philimonovna, the nurse, was thrust in at the doorway.

“Well, what is it, Matrona?” queried Stepan Arkadyevitch, going up to her at the door.

Although Stepan Arkadyevitch was completely in the wrong as regards his wife, and was conscious of this himself, almost every one in the house (even the nurse, Darya Alexandrovna’s chief ally) was on his side.

“Well, what now?” he asked disconsolately.

“Go to her, sir; own your fault again. Maybe God will aid you. She is suffering so, it’s sad to see her; and besides, everything in the house is topsy-turvy. You must have pity, sir, on the children. Beg her forgiveness, sir. There’s no help for it! One must take the consequences...”

“But she won’t see me.”

“You do your part. God is merciful; pray to God, sir, pray to God.”

“Come, that’ll do, you can go,” said Stepan Arkadyevitch, blushing suddenly. “Well now, do dress me.” He turned to Matvey and threw off his dressing-gown decisively.

Matvey was already holding up the shirt like a horse’s collar, and, blowing off some invisible speck, he slipped it with obvious pleasure over the well-groomed body of his master.

Chapter 3

When he was dressed, Stepan Arkadyevitch sprinkled some scent on himself, pulled down his shirt-cuffs, distributed into his pockets his cigarettes, pocketbook, matches, and watch with its double chain and seals, and shaking out his handkerchief, feeling himself clean, fragrant, healthy, and physically at ease, in spite of his unhappiness, he walked with a slight swing on each leg into the dining-room, where coffee was already waiting for him, and beside the coffee, letters and papers from the office.

He read the letters. One was very unpleasant, from a merchant who was buying a forest on his wife’s property. To sell this forest was absolutely essential; but at present, until he was reconciled with his wife, the subject could not be discussed. The most unpleasant thing of all was that his pecuniary interests should in this way enter into the question of his reconciliation with his wife. And the idea that he might be led on by his interests, that he might seek a reconciliation with his wife on account of the sale of the forest-that idea hurt him.

When he had finished his letters, Stepan Arkadyevitch moved the office-papers close to him, rapidly looked through two pieces of business, made a few notes with a big pencil, and pushing away the papers, turned to his coffee. As he sipped his coffee, he opened a still damp morning paper, and began reading it.

Stepan Arkadyevitch took in and read a liberal paper, not an extreme one, but one advocating the views held by the majority. And in spite of the fact that science, art, and politics had no special interest for him, he firmly held those views on all these subjects which were held by the majority and by his paper, and he only changed them when the majority changed them-or, more strictly speaking, he did not change them, but they imperceptibly changed of themselves within him.

Stepan Arkadyevitch had not chosen his political opinions or his views; these political opinions and views had come to him of themselves, just as he did not choose the shapes of his hat and coat, but simply took those that were being worn. And for him, living in a certain society-owing to the need, ordinarily developed at years of discretion, for some degree of mental activity-to have views was just as indispensable as to have a hat. If there was a reason for his preferring liberal to conservative views, which were held also by many of his circle, it arose not from his considering liberalism more rational, but from its being in closer accordance with his manner of life. The liberal party said that in Russia everything is wrong, and certainly Stepan Arkadyevitch had many debts and was decidedly short of money. The liberal party said that marriage is an institution quite out of date, and that it needs reconstruction; and family life certainly afforded Stepan Arkadyevitch little gratification, and forced him into lying and hypocrisy, which was so repulsive to his nature. The liberal party said, or rather allowed it to be understood, that religion is only a curb to keep in check the barbarous classes of the people; and Stepan Arkadyevitch could not get through even a short service without his legs aching from standing up, and could never make out what was the object of all the terrible and high-flown language about another world when life might be so very amusing in this world. And with all this, Stepan Arkadyevitch, who liked a joke, was fond of puzzling a plain man by saying that if he prided himself on his origin, he ought not to stop at Rurik and disown the first founder of his family-the monkey. And so Liberalism had become a habit of Stepan Arkadyevitch’s, and he liked his newspaper, as he did his cigar after dinner, for the slight fog it diffused in his brain. He read the leading article, in which it was maintained that it was quite senseless in our day to raise an outcry that radicalism was threatening to swallow up all conservative elements, and that the government ought to take measures to crush the revolutionary hydra; that, on the contrary, “in our opinion the danger lies not in that fantastic revolutionary hydra, but in the obstinacy of traditionalism clogging progress,” etc., etc. He read another article, too, a financial one, which alluded to Bentham and Mill, and dropped some innuendoes reflecting on the ministry. With his characteristic quickwittedness he caught the drift of each innuendo, divined whence it came, at whom and on what ground it was aimed, and that afforded him, as it always did, a certain satisfaction. But today that satisfaction was embittered by Matrona Philimonovna’s advice and the unsatisfactory state of the household. He read, too, that Count Beist was rumored to have left for Wiesbaden, and that one need have no more gray hair, and of the sale of a light carriage, and of a young person seeking a situation; but these items of information did not give him, as usual, a quiet, ironical gratification. Having finished the paper, a second cup of coffee and a roll and butter, he got up, shaking the crumbs of the roll off his waistcoat; and, squaring his broad chest, he smiled joyously: not because there was anything particularly agreeable in his mind-the joyous smile was evoked by a good digestion.

But this joyous smile at once recalled everything to him, and he grew thoughtful.

Two childish voices (Stepan Arkadyevitch recognized the voices of Grisha, his youngest boy, and Tanya, his eldest girl) were heard outside the door. They were carrying something, and dropped it.

“I told you not to sit passengers on the roof,” said the little girl in English; “there, pick them up!”

“Everything’s in confusion,” thought Stepan Arkadyevitch; “there are the children running about by themselves.” And going to the door, he called them. They threw down the box, that represented a train, and came in to their father.

The little girl, her father’s favorite, ran up boldly, embraced him, and hung laughingly on his neck, enjoying as she always did the smell of scent that came from his whiskers. At last the little girl kissed his face, which was flushed from his stooping posture and beaming with tenderness, loosed her hands, and was about to run away again; but her father held her back.

“How is mamma?” he asked, passing his hand over his daughter’s smooth, soft little neck. “Good morning,” he said, smiling to the boy, who had come up to greet him. He was conscious that he loved the boy less, and always tried to be fair; but the boy felt it, and did not respond with a smile to his father’s chilly smile.

“Mamma? She is up,” answered the girl.

Stepan Arkadyevitch sighed. “That means that she’s not slept again all night,” he thought.

“Well, is she cheerful?”

The little girl knew that there was a quarrel between her father and mother, and that her mother could not be cheerful, and that her father must be aware of this, and that he was pretending when he asked about it so lightly. And she blushed for her father. He at once perceived it, and blushed too.

“I don’t know,” she said. “She did not say we must do our lessons, but she said we were to go for a walk with Miss Hoole to grandmamma’s.”

“Well, go, Tanya, my darling. Oh, wait a minute, though,” he said, still holding her and stroking her soft little hand.

He took off the mantelpiece, where he had put it yesterday, a little box of sweets, and gave her two, picking out her favorites, a chocolate and a fondant.

“For Grisha?” said the little girl, pointing to the chocolate.

“Yes, yes.” And still stroking her little shoulder, he kissed her on the roots of her hair and neck, and let her go.

“The carriage is ready,” said Matvey; “but there’s some one to see you with a petition.”

“Been here long?” asked Stepan Arkadyevitch.

“Half an hour.”

“How many times have I told you to tell me at once?”

“One must let you drink your coffee in peace, at least,” said Matvey, in the affectionately gruff tone with which it was impossible to be angry.

“Well, show the person up at once,” said Oblonsky, frowning with vexation.

The petitioner, the widow of a staff captain Kalinin, came with a request impossible and unreasonable; but Stepan Arkadyevitch, as he generally did, made her sit down, heard her to the end attentively without interrupting her, and gave her detailed advice as to how and to whom to apply, and even wrote her, in his large, sprawling, good and legible hand, a confident and fluent little note to a personage who might be of use to her. Having got rid of the staff captain’s widow, Stepan Arkadyevitch took his hat and stopped to recollect whether he had forgotten anything. It appeared that he had forgotten nothing except what he wanted to forget-his wife.

“Ah, yes!” He bowed his head, and his handsome face assumed a harassed expression. “To go, or not to go!” he said to himself; and an inner voice told him he must not go, that nothing could come of it but falsity; that to amend, to set right their relations was impossible, because it was impossible to make her attractive again and able to inspire love, or to make him an old man, not susceptible to love. Except deceit and lying nothing could come of it now; and deceit and lying were opposed to his nature.

“It must be some time, though: it can’t go on like this,” he said, trying to give himself courage. He squared his chest, took out a cigarette, took two whiffs at it, flung it into a mother-of-pearl ashtray, and with rapid steps walked through the drawing room, and opened the other door into his wife’s bedroom.

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About the authors

Leo Tolstoy

Leo Tolstoy

Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910) was a renowned Russian writer, best known for his epic novels and philosophical works. He is considered one of the greatest authors of all time. Some of his most famous works include:

  1. "War and Peace" (1869) – A historical novel set during the Napoleonic Wars, it explores themes of history, free will, and human experience through the lives of aristocratic Russian families.
  2. "Anna Karenina" (1877) – This tragic love story examines the complexities of family, morality, and the conflict between personal happiness and societal norms.

Tolstoy was also a social reformer and a thinker who espoused nonviolence and simple living. He had strong spiritual beliefs, particularly later in life, and became a Christian anarchist, rejecting organized religion and advocating for pacifism, vegetarianism, and the rejection of private property. His ideas on nonviolent resistance deeply influenced figures like Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr.

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Reviews

Customer reviews

4.6 out of 5

1,713 global ratings

Gio

Gio

5

Kostya Levin, the True Hero....

Reviewed in the United States on August 7, 2011

Verified Purchase

... of this immense mistakenly titled novel, is patently Lev Tolstoy masquerading as an artless thinker, that is, a Thinker without an Art, neither a painter nor a writer, simply a man trying to find find meaning in life by thinking about himself. Does he think too much? Eventually he thinks so. He's happiest when he wields his own scythe, an aristocrat embarrassing his serfs both by his energy and by his inappropriate humility. More pages of the novel are devoted to Levin's erratic musings and violent mood swings than to any other character, male or female. Levin is the protagonist as well as his own antagonist. Levin is the intellectual leavening of this tear-sodden melodrama. It's Levin's epiphany, his realization of a plausible happiness amid the falsehood and grief of life, that concludes the book, long pages after the death of the title-character. Levin's abjuration of Reason and embrace of instinctive mysticism do not amount to an Answer to Life's Big Questions for this reader, but Levin is a fully realized human being, one of the most believable in all literature, just as this novel is one of the most perfectly realized works of fiction ever written.

"Anna Karenina" is an earnest philosophical novel upon which a fiery opera is grafted. The graft is surgically perfect. It takes. The stories of Anna and Vronsky, Levin and Kitty, Levin and his Doubts are all melded together seamlessly. There have been at least half a dozen grand operas based on "Anna Karenina", none of which have held the stage either artistically or commercially, not merely because the novel is too large for a libretto but because the deepest parts are invariably excluded. No Levin interior monologues, no leavening of the plot! Grand opera, in the tradition of 19th C Romanticism, isn't amenable to Tolstoy's quasi-Jungian Weltanschauung. It seems that Leos Janacek attempted to compose an "Anna Karenina" opera, but abandoned the project. And if Janacek couldn't do it, no one else had a chance!

I'm not a scholar of Russian literature. I haven't read the preface to this translation, or any biography of Tolstoy, or a single essay about "Anna Karenina", but I'm convinced that Levin is Tolstoy's spiritual self-portrait, and his prefiguration of the course his own life would take. I also have to confess, sadly, that I can't read a word of Russian. This great novel exists for me only via translation. Whether the Pevear-Volokhonsky translation captures any or none of Tolstoy's literary flair is completely opaque to me. I had read the 100-year-old translation that remains the most widely known, and assumed that the novel had to be better in the orginal, since the translation amounted to wretched English prose. Now I can at least confidently declare that Pevear's translation is good English prose. In fact, if I were given a paragraph of it without a title and with all the place names replaced by sites in North Dakota, I think I would be fooled. I wouldn't suspect a translation.

"Anna Karenina" is a sublime creation, unquestionably a "world classic." Don't be afraid of its length, or of its depth.

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14 people found this helpful

Ernie Truman

Ernie Truman

5

5 stars in terms of overall impact.

Reviewed in the United States on September 6, 2022

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Reading translations has always seemed to lessen my engagement with a book mainly because I am hyper-aware of the fact that unless I learn the original language of the story I will never 100% read the actual story the way it was meant to be read. In rating a book like Anna Karenina I don't think I'm rating Leo Tolstoy as much as I'm rating Richard Peaver and Larissa Volokhonsky. One can make the same claim for any given spiritual text. How can I say things like "this book is too long" when I am ignorant not only of the source material but also in the challenges that were faced in translating the spirit of the work into a completely different language? The answer is that I can't. Although many characters seem to feel things "in the depths of their souls" (an expression I grew tired of in the book) I wondered if that is what Tolstoy actually wrote in Russian or if he used expressions that have no equivalent in English. This is one example of what I mean. Did Tolstoy overuse expressions or did the translators have no other way of putting it? Who am I really critiquing?

I will say that the characters, in one way or another, were relatable and touched my mind and heart in ways I was not expecting. All the characters reflected something in me that I had experienced in one way or another in myself. Levin was perhaps the most relatable and, speaking for myself, is what makes this story work.

Translation or not, the length still felt excessively long and given that War and Peace is regarded as an extremely long book and in need of a trim, I suspect the length is more of a Tolstoy thing. Much like I've heard of Dickens, this book has long sentences that seem to take you on an odyssey to arrive at an idea or expression that didn't seem to be worth the trip. It doesn't hurt the overall work but sometimes one can almost lose the rhythm and pacing of the narrative. Also, not knowing much about Russian politics some aspects can seem boring. I dont know if it is due to my ignorance as a reader or the age of the work and the challenges at translating ideas.

Overall I can say that I loved the overall work and look forward to reading more translations of Russian literature. I can't say if this is the best translation, but for me it was quite enjoyable. I would highly recommend it with a heads-up on certain aspects of the book that could feel a bit overdone ("in the depths of his soul") or certain sentences that seem to lose narrative flow.

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22 people found this helpful

J. A Bowen

J. A Bowen

5

The Genius of Tolstoy

Reviewed in the United States on December 14, 2010

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I first read "Anna Karenina" in the eighth grade. I say that not to show off my precocity as a child, but simply to say how accessible this classic is for the noviate, especially of Russian literature.

The doomed romance of Count Vronsky, a handsome, spoiled and immoral member of Russia's vast aristocracy, and Anna, a beautiful, sensual woman trapped in a loveless marriage, is one that any young romantic (esp. female) can easily become enthralled with. The translation I read is one that was out of print long ago, and this new version makes readability a little easier. I myself was intrigued with the differences in idioms, and the somewhat stilted phrasing charmed me. Parts of the dialogue were as effortless as reading an English novel. What mattered was whether the story moved along, whether the characters were interesting, and whether Tolstoy portrayed Russian society as it was in the 1800's. The answer to all of these is a resounding "yes".

The place I bogged down in is probably the place all first-time readers bog down -- the story of Levin, a young nobleman who undoubtedly was created to speak for the mind and heart of Leo Tolstoy. We can see the transformation of Levin, a sensitive, sort of blundering fellow who is pure of heart, into the person that Tolstoy became. If you know the story of Tolstoy's personal life, you can see that Levin, like Tolstoy, married the woman of his dreams. Sadly, you also know (although the novel ends before this happens to Levin) how bitterly unhappy that marriage was to become.

Tolstoy's love for "Mother Russia" is the real love story here, and he does not attempt to sugar-coat the truth. Knowing what we know now about the Russian revolution and the stranglehold Communism had on that country for so long, it is fascinating to see the seeds being sown in Tolstoy's time.

As for Anna and Vronsky, again there is no attempt to prettify the picture. The genius of Tolstoy is that he speaks the plain, unvarnished truth. He has great compassion for his characters and they are multi-faceted and deeply intriguing.

Nowadays there is a great deal of admiration for "literary fiction" and the incredibly long and obtuse sentences, the obscure words, that adorn this fiction. You will find none of that in Tolstoy. His genius lies in a great story, told simply and with strength and honesty. I suggest several readings of "Anna Karenina", and it will have an honored place on your bookshelf.

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