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Leo Tolstoy

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Anna Karenina (Modern Library Classics) Kindle Edition

by Leo Tolstoy (Author), Leonard J. Kent (Editor), Nina Berberova (Editor), Format: Kindle Edition

4.5 251 ratings

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This edition, the famous Constance Garnett translation, has been revised throughout by Leonard J. Kent and Nina Berberova.

"Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." So begins Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy's great modern novel of an adulterous affair set against the backdrop of Moscow and St. Petersburg high society in the later half of the nineteenth century. A sophisticated woman who is respectably married to a government bureaucrat, Anna begins a passionate, all-consuming involvement with a rich army officer. Refusing to conduct a discreet affair, she scandalizes society by abandoning both her husband and her young son for Count Vronsky--with tragic consequences. Running parallel is the story of the courtship and marriage of Konstantin Levin (the melancholy nobleman who is Tolstoy's stand-in) and Princess Kitty Shcherbatsky.

Levin's spiritual searching and growth reflect the religious ideals that at the time Tolstoy was evolving for himself. Taken together, the two plots embroider a vast canvas that ultimately encompasses all levels of Russian society. "Now and then Tolstoy's novel writes its own self, is produced by its matter, but its subject," noted Vladimir Nabokov. "Anna Karenina is one of the greatest love stories in world literature." As Matthew Arnold wrote in his celebrated essay on Tolstoy: "We are not to take Anna Karenina as a work of art; we are to take it as a piece of life."

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1008
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Publisher

Modern Library
Publication date

2012
March 28
Reading age

18 years and up
File size

3.1 MB
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Editorial Reviews

Review

"One of the greatest love stories in world literature."
--Vladimir Nabokov

From the Inside Flap

A magnificent drama of vengeance, infidelity, and retribution, Anna Karenina portrays the moving story of people whose emotions conflict with the dominant social mores of their time. Sensual, rebellious Anna falls deeply and passionately in love with the handsome Count Vronsky. When she refuses to conduct the discreet affair that her cold, ambitious husband (and Russian high society) would condone, she is doomed. Set against the tragic love of Anna and Vronsky, the plight of the melancholy nobleman Konstantine Levin unfolds. In doubt about the meaning of life, haunted by thoughts of suicide, Levin's struggles echo Tolstoy's own spiritual crisis. But Anna's inner turmoil mirrors the own emotional imprisonment and mental disintegration of a woman who dares to transgress the strictures of a patriarchal world. In Anna Karenina Leo Tolstoy brought to perfection the novel of social realism and created a masterpiece that bared the Russian soul. --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.

Amazon.com Review

Some people say Anna Karenina is the single greatest novel ever written, which makes about as much sense to me as trying to determine the world's greatest color. But there is no doubt that Anna Karenina, generally considered Tolstoy's best book, is definitely one ripping great read. Anna, miserable in her loveless marriage, does the barely thinkable and succumbs to her desires for the dashing Vronsky. I don't want to give away the ending, but I will say that 19th-century Russia doesn't take well to that sort of thing. --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.

From the Publisher

A magnificent drama of vengeance, infidelity, and retribution, Anna Karenina portrays the moving story of people whose emotions conflict with the dominant social mores of their time. Sensual, rebellious Anna falls deeply and passionately in love with the handsome Count Vronsky. When she refuses to conduct the discreet affair that her cold, ambitious husband (and Russian high society) would condone, she is doomed. Set against the tragic love of Anna and Vronsky, the plight of the melancholy nobleman Konstantine Levin unfolds. In doubt about the meaning of life, haunted by thoughts of suicide, Levin's struggles echo Tolstoy's own spiritual crisis. But Anna's inner turmoil mirrors the own emotional imprisonment and mental disintegration of a woman who dares to transgress the strictures of a patriarchal world. In Anna Karenina Leo Tolstoy brought to perfection the novel of social realism and created a masterpiece that bared the Russian soul. --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.

From Library Journal

Pevear and Volokhonsky, winners of the 1991 PEN/Book-of-the-Month Club Translation Prize for their version of Fyodor Dostoyevsky's The Brothers Karamazov, have produced the first new translation of Leo Tolstoy's classic Anna Karenina in 40 years. The result should make the book accessible to a new generation of readers. In an informative introduction, Pevear gives the reader a history of the work Tolstoy called his first true novel and which took him some four years to write. Pevear explains how Tolstoy took real events, incorporated them into his novel, and went through several versions before this tale of the married Anna and her love for Count Vronsky emerged in its final form in 1876. It was during the writing of the book that Tolstoy went through a religious crisis in his life, which is reflected in this novel. The translation is easily readable and succeeds in bringing Tolstoy's masterpiece to life once again. For all libraries. Ron Ratliff, Kansas State Univ., Manhattan
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.

About the Author

The Modern Library has played a significant role in American cultural life for the better part of a century. The series was founded in 1917 by the publishers Boni and Liveright and eight years later acquired by Bennett Cerf and Donald Klopfer. It provided the foundation for their next publishing venture, Random House. The Modern Library has been a staple of the American book trade, providing readers with affordable hardbound editions of important works of literature and thought. For the Modern Library's seventy-fifth anniversary, Random House redesigned the series, restoring as its emblem the running torch-bearer created by Lucian Bernhard in 1925 and refurbishing jackets, bindings, and type, as well as inaugurating a new program of selecting titles. The Modern Library continues to provide the world's best books, at the best prices. --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.

From the Back Cover

A magnificent drama of vengeance, infidelity, and retribution, "Anna Karenina portrays the moving story of people whose emotions conflict with the dominant social mores of their time. Sensual, rebellious Anna falls deeply and passionately in love with the handsome Count Vronsky. When she refuses to conduct the discreet affair that her cold, ambitious husband (and Russian high society) would condone, she is doomed. Set against the tragic love of Anna and Vronsky, the plight of the melancholy nobleman Konstantine Levin unfolds. In doubt about the meaning of life, haunted by thoughts of suicide, Levin's struggles echo Tolstoy's own spiritual crisis. But Anna's inner turmoil mirrors the own emotional imprisonment and mental disintegration of a woman who dares to transgress the strictures of a patriarchal world. In "Anna Karenina Leo Tolstoy brought to perfection the novel of social realism and created a masterpiece that bared the Russian soul. --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.

From AudioFile

Released to coincide with a new film version and featuring one of its stars, this recording compresses the original a little too much. We get the entire story of Anna's tragic adultery and the subplot of Levin's search for meaningful love and work. But the distinctive thematic material and Russian character are sacrificed. On the plus side, Molina reads well indeed. His impersonations have great depth. He can leap into their full emotional intensity from a dead stop, thus elevating the audio considerably above the level of "Cliffs Notes." Y.R. (c)AudioFile, Portland, Maine --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Since Anna Kareninawas published in 1877, almost everyone who matters in the history of literature has put in his two cents (and a few who stand out in other realms--from Matthew Arnold, who wrote a cogent essay in 1887 about "Count Tolstoy's" novel, to Lenin, who, while acknowledging his "first class works of world literature," refers to him as "a worn out sniveller who beat his breast and boasted to the world that he now lived on rice patties").

Dostoyevsky, a contemporary, declared Anna Karenina perfect "as an artistic production." Proust calls Tolstoy "a serene god." Comparing his work to that of Balzac, he said, "In Tolstoi everything is great by nature--the droppings of an elephant beside those of a goat. Those great harvest scenes in Anna K., the hunting scenes, the skating scenes . . ." Flaubert just exclaims, "What an artist and what a psychologist!" Virginia Woolf declares him "greatest of all novelists. . . . He notices the blue or red of a child's frock . . . every twig, every feather sticks to his magnet."

A few cranks, of course, weigh in on the other side. Joseph Conrad wrote a complimentary letter to Constance Garnett's husband and mentioned, "of the thing itself I think but little," a crack Nabokov never forgave him. Turgenev said, "I don't like Anna Karenina, although there are some truly great pages in it (the races, the mowing, the hunting). But it's all sour, it reeks of Moscow, incense, old maids, Slavophilism, the nobility, etc. . . . The second part is trivial and boring." But Turgenev was by then an ex-friend and Tolstoy had once challenged him to a duel.

E. M. Forster said, "Great chords begin to sound, and we cannot say exactly what struck them. They do not arise from the story. . . . They do not come from the episodes nor yet from the characters. They come from the immense area of Russia. . . . Many novelists have the feeling for place . . . very few have the sense of space, and the possession of it ranks high in Tolstoy's divine equipment."

After finishing Anna Karenina, Tolstoy himself said (to himself, in his journal), "Very well, you will be more famous than Gogol or Pushkin or Shakespeare or Molière, or than all the writers of the world--and what of it?"

More great essays than I can recount here have been written about the book, especially those by George Steiner, Gary Saul Morson, Eduard Babev, and Raymond Williams.

Tolstoy criticism continues to thrive, and now includes its own home called the Tolstoy Studies Journal. Resorting to any library today, one can page through recent articles with titles like "Tolstoy on the Couch: Misogyny, Masochism, the Absent Mother," by Daniel Rancour-Lafarriere; "Passion in Competition: The Sporting Motif in Anna Karenina," by Howard Schwartz; "Food and the Adulterous Woman: Sexual and Social Morality in Anna Karenina," by Karin Horwatt; and even "Anna Karenina's Peter Pan Syndrome," by Vladimir Goldstein.

What's left, in the year 2000, for me to say?

Once, when I was a girl of eleven or twelve, sprawled on a sofa reading, an adult friend of the family noticed that I went through books quickly and suggested that every time I finished one, I enter the name of the author and title, publisher, the dates during which I read it, and what my impressions were on a three-by-five index card.

That kind of excellent habit is one we can easily imagine cultivated by the young Shcherbatsky princesses, when we first meet them "wrapped in a mysterious poetical veil." Levin wonders from afar, "Why it was the three young ladies had to speak French and English on alternate days; why it was that at certain hours they took turns playing the piano, the sounds of which were audible in their brother's room . . . why they were visited by those professors of French literature, of music, of drawing, of dancing; why at certain hours all three young ladies, and Mademoiselle Linon, drove in the coach to Tverskoy Boulevard, dressed in their satin cloaks, Dolly in a long one, Natalie in a shorter one, and Kitty in one so short that her shapely little legs in tight red stockings were exposed."

Of course, I was an American girl, not a Russian princess, and instead of foreign languages and piano tutors what I had was outside. From dawn to dusk, all summer, we ran to the woods, scavenging lumber, hauling boards, digging holes to build forts that were rarely completed; but we became muddy and tired.
I never followed the family friend's good advice.

Now I wish I had. A reason to keep a reading journal would be to compare the experience of the same book met at different ages. It could provide the deepest kind of diary. Anna Karenina, War and Peace, In Search of Lost Time and Middlemarch hold sway over a reader for weeks, months, a whole summer, and so we tend to remember our lives along with them, the way we would someone we'd roomed with for a period of months and then not seen again. I remember Tolstoy's novels personally--where I was when I first read them, for whom I was pining or from whom I was recovering. (For me, the novels were a bit long to read in the throes.)

Tolstoy himself kept just such a diary, his biographers tell us, a journal of "girls and reading. And remorse." He presented these journals, with all their literary impressions and squalid confessions, to his young fiance, Sofia Behrs, as Levin does to Kitty in Anna Karenina.

In the novel, as in Tolstoy's life, the squalor got all the attention from the young bride to be. But for history, as it might have been for Tolstoy later in his life, his youthful writing about books proves to be not only more important but more personal.

Though I didn't keep a journal of reading, I did keep journals of "feelings," largely of boys whose names the black-bound volumes record. A list of those names no longer conjures the faces or characteristic gestures.

But I remember where I was the first time I read Anna Karenina. I was at Yaddo, a writers' colony in upstate New York, during the high season, and I felt distinctly outside the community's social world. Another young female writer arrived with, it seemed to me, a better wardrobe. I found myself checking what she was wearing at every meal. I hadn't considered that I was visiting a town that for more than 150 years had been a summer "watering hole." A small backpack held all my clothes for the summer. A pretty orchestra conductor with whom I jogged examined a pin-sized stain on my best white blouse. "I wouldn't wear it," she said.

I was twenty-four years old and, I'll admit it, I read the novel to learn about love. I was at the beginning of my life and I'd come from one of the unhappy families Tolstoy mentions. I was, in my own oblique way, writing about that circus in all its distinction. But I wanted my own life to be one of the happy ones and I felt at peace there, in my studio on the second story of an old wooden, formal house. I had the time to lie on my white bed with the pine fronds ticking the window and learn how.

I felt enchanted, as any girl might be, with the balls, the ice-skating parties, most especially with Kitty's European tour to recover from heartbreak. I identified with Anna and with Kitty, never for a second with Varenka, whose position might have actually been closest to my own.

In fact, I was young enough to remember a particular magazine I'd read while in a toy store as a child, no doubt published by the Mattel Corporation, that chronicled a holiday week in the life of a doll called Barbie. Like the characters in Anna Karenina, Barbie also went to an ice-skating party and wore a muff. Barbie also owned formal gowns. Barbie, too, sat to have her portrait painted.

I mention this not to call attention to the rather girlish and unsophisticated imagination I still had but rather to show how far into a child's fantasy Tolstoy ventures before then shocking us by rendering our heroine's aversion to touching her husband. And here I'm not talking only about Anna. He makes mention of Kitty's "revulsion" toward Levin as well.

I read--that first time--for the central characters, to see whom they married; to decide what was dangerous in a man, what fulfilling; what kind of love to hope for, to fear.

I didn't like Vronsky. Or I did, but I was afraid of him. Vronsky says something at the beginning of the novel that the repeat reader will never forget. We meet him, in his first appearance, as Kitty's suitor, and already fear--as her mother will not quite let herself--that he will turn out to be a cad. The conversation in the parlor turns to table-rapping and spirits, and Countess Nordston, who believed in spiritualism, begins to describe the marvels she has seen.

Vronsky says, " '. . . for pity's sake, do take me to see them! I have never seen anything extraordinary, though I am always on the lookout for it everywhere.' " He says this in Kitty's living room, in her presence. Of course, he has not yet seen Anna.

That night, after flirting with Kitty, he goes straight home to his rented room and falls asleep early, musing, "That's why I like the Shcherbatskys', because I become better there."

His yearning for the extraordinary, the small account he gives to the peace-giving quality of the Shcherbatskys, tells his whole story, the way a prologue often announces the great Shakespearean themes. Kitty's father has never liked or trusted Vronsky, while her mother favors him, considering Levin only a "good" match, but Vronsky a "brilliant" one.

The dangers and glory of that kind of exceptionalism--in love--were for me, that first time, the subject of the novel.

That question of the viability of extraordinary and ordinary loves was even more riveting for me, at twenty-four, than the differences between happy and unhappy families. This dilemma, in fact--along with work and how to get by on little money in New York City--was the main thing my friends and I talked about. How X loves Y, but Y loves Z, but Z loves . . . all coming down to whether we would have great loves or have to "settle," as we put it.

Of course, we all want to have something extraordinary, in love. None of us, at twenty-four anyway, wants to settle or be settled for.

Part of what is touching, on a second reading, is Vronsky's first meeting with Anna. If you had asked me about that scene before I reread the book, I would have relied on convention and said that Vronsky met a beautiful woman at the train station. But on first seeing Anna--who will be for Vronsky the great love--Vronsky sees her full of life, but not necessarily exceptional. He glances at her once more "not because she was very beautiful" but because of an expression on her face of "something peculiarly . . . soft." Vronsky has not had an ordinary family life. He doesn't much remember his father, and his mother, now "a dried-up old lady," had been "a brilliant society woman, who had had during her married life, and especially afterward, many love affairs notorious in all society." Tolstoy makes it clear that Vronsky does not love or respect his mother.

Anna says, " 'The countess and I have been talking all the time, I of my son and she of hers.' "

Vronsky recognizes Anna first as a mother, a mother miserable to be away--for only a few days--from her beloved son. We might say that what seemed extraordinary for him was just the quality of ordinary maternal devotion his own mother never had.

And here we feel the tragic parallel. Anna is bound to become a woman like Vronsky's mother, notorious for her affair. Later on, her great concern will be that her son may lose respect for her.

Vronsky will wish for nothing more than to make his daughter legitimate and to marry Anna, in the usual way.

" 'My love keeps growing more passionate and selfish, while his is dying, and that's why we're drifting apart,' " Anna says, near the end. " 'He is everything to me, and I want him more and more to give himself up to me entirely. And he wants more and more to get away from me. . . . If I could be anything but a mistress, passionately caring for nothing but his caresses; but I can't and I don't care to be anything else. And by that desire I rouse aversion in him, and he rouses fury in me, and it cannot be different.' "

There, Anna is, I believe, talking about sex. But by then, Vronsky wants the precious ordinary: a marriage, a family--which is as unattainable for him as his heightened passion is for Kitty or Levin or Dolly or even Stiva. --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B000FCKNXC
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Modern Library; 1st edition (March 28, 2012)
Publication date ‏ : ‎ March 28, 2012
Language ‏ : ‎ English
File size ‏ : ‎ 3120 KB
Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
Print length ‏ : ‎ 1008 pages

Best Sellers Rank: #429,601 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #167 in History & Criticism of Russian & Soviet Literature
- #545 in Classic Romance Fiction
- #590 in Classic Historical Fiction

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Leo Tolstoy

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Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910) wrote two of the great novels of the nineteenth century, War and Peace and Anna Karenina.

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M. A. Seifter

Anna K and her tale of tragic love

Reviewed in the United States on November 28, 2023

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Excellent translation of Tolstoi's literary masterpiece. Tolstoi's fluid, carry-the-reader-along narrative, like that of Pushkin, is well duplicated in Joel Carmichael's excellent translation. (I am not too prickly with translations; as long as it is readable and gives an honest transmission of the original author's intent, plot and characters, I will accept it.) This translation also works for me because it is not labored down with a long editorial forward or afterword, or footnotes, which in novels are an abomination.

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Dew Kuriyama

The mysterious encounter

Reviewed in the United States on May 30, 2013

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The love is an encounter of two space.
The space of Mrs. Russian nobles named Anna.
The space of Vronsky earl.
The encounter in the train is mysterious.
When these two spaces are going to become one, love happens.
However, Anna loves her very young child, and she is tied up by her husband.
Vronsky earl is tied up by his mother.
Even if they are going to become one, a collision occurs before long because two people are going to move freely.
In this way tragedy happens ..
We had better look at the scene of the encounter of two people whom Tolstoy describes.
The ability as his splendid artist vividly appears there.
It is terrible power of description.

【　With the insight of a man of the world, from one glance at this lady’s appearance Vronsky classified her as belonging to the best society. He excused himself, and was about to get into the carriage, but felt he must glance at her once more; not because of the elegance and modest grace that were apparent in her whole figure, but because in the expression of her charming face, as she passed close by him, there was something peculiarly caressing and soft. As he looked around, she too turned her head.
Her shining gray eyes, which looked dark from the thick lashes, rested with friendly attention on his face, as though she recognized him, and then promptly turned away to the passing crowd, as tough seeking someone. In that brief look Vronsky had time to notice the suppressed eagerness which played over her face, and flitted between the brilliant eyes and the faint smile that curved her red lips.　It was as though her nature was so brimming over with something that against her will it showed itself now in the flash of her eyes , and now in her smile.】

One person found this helpful

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A Student

Modern Library Kindle Edition

Reviewed in the United States on August 15, 2012

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Since Amazon is terrible at associating kindle versions with the correct book, this review is for the Modern Library Kindle Edition: Anna Karenina . This is a a Garnett translation edited by Leonard Kent and Nina Berberova, not a Carmichael translation.

I have tried a lot of the Anna Karenina kindle editions. Although there is another Garnett version with annotations Anna Karenina - Full Version (Annotated) (Literary Classics Collection) is cheaper, I bought this because it is slightly better formatted for the Kindle. The difference is that the footnotes are found at the end of a chapter, as opposed to the end of the book. On a non-touch Kindle, it's clunky to navigate to a footnote, read it, and then hit back. It interrupts the reading flow.

With footnotes at the end of a chapter (and chapters being relatively small), the footnotes in the Modern Library version are relatively timely. You can get to the end of a chapter and read the footnotes and still remember what they refer to.

I also decided it was worth it to get a more official curated version of Anna Karenina; many of the cheaper versions you see are just people repacking off-the-internet the Garnett (unrevised) or Maude translations.

The Pevear & Volokhonsky version costs twice as much as this version, and the footnotes are also at the end of the book instead of the end of a chapter.

23 people found this helpful

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Elise Idle

I have mixed feeling about this book, but there ...

Reviewed in the United States on February 23, 2017

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I have mixed feeling about this book, but there is no denying it's an incredible novel. Tolstoy's insight into human nature is, at times, disconcerting. His thoughts and ideas on feminist issues were ahead of their time.

One person found this helpful

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charlotte's web

Anna Karenina is the best novel of all time!

Reviewed in the United States on September 27, 2009

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most authors when writing a fiction focus on one main character: Tolstoy, in "Anna Karenina", gives you a panoramic view of society, you see the inside thoughts and motives behind every main character, as well as every minor character, with such simplicity. You are given a thorough description of every scene, every conversation... and yet it's done with such skill that it is easily noted and understood.

It is a lengthy book, but one separated by micro-chapters, the longest lasting a mere 10 pages. The average chapter is around 4 to 5 pages.
It's a great book to read if you don't have much time to read, as you can read a whole chapter in a matter of minutes.

It is a book that still applies to today's society... you can see yourself as one of the many characters, they seem to have so much in common with who we are, or, as your life changes, who you are to be.
I have read this book easily a dozen times and each time I come away with something different. Every time, certainly, I feel like I am learning more about the very nature of people: and the nature of myself. The purpose of this life.

Very worth the read. The best book in all history in my opinion. I am sure many would agree with me. a masterpiece. unparalleled in any other work.

5 people found this helpful

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Keith Kendall

One of my favorite marriage manuals

Reviewed in the United States on April 15, 2020

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

Each reading of this book brings additional insight and understanding. That just seems to be a characteristic of a classic book. Rereading brings additional delight.

The kindle edition that I read this time has some commentary after the body of the book. One of them is a letter from Leo Tolstoy where he says the book could not be any shorter.

“[If] I were to try to say in words everything that I intended to express in my novel, I would have to write the same novel I wrote from the beginning. And if short-sighted critics think that I only wanted to describe the things that I like, what Oblonsky has for dinner or what Karenina’s shoulders are like, they are mistaken.”

3 people found this helpful

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Top reviews from other countries

Saibal debbarma

Tranlsation not any good.

Reviewed in India on October 30, 2018

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This is not a very good translation. I came up with a penguin ed. In my university library which is very good. Though this looks like a baggy verbose huge novel but it has a engaging story line told very simply without didactic pretensions. But this translation stinks. Because it is very slipshod.Waste of money. Compare the meaning of the first line with other translations and you will get it. Two stars for amazon service. One star for the book.

One person found this helpful

AMITJOT SINGH

Great

Reviewed in Canada on October 18, 2020

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Excellent

Paul

The greatest fiction writer of all time

Reviewed in Canada on September 6, 2020

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