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Constance Garnett

Leo Tolstoy

Anna Karenina (Modern Library Classics) Paperback – October 10, 2000

by Leo Tolstoy (Author), Leonard J. Kent (Editor), Nina Berberova (Editor),

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Considered by some to be the greatest novel ever written, Anna Karenina is Tolstoy's classic tale of love and adultery set against the backdrop of high society in Moscow and Saint Petersburg. A rich and complex masterpiece, the novel charts the disastrous course of a love affair between Anna, a beautiful married woman, and Count Vronsky, a wealthy army officer. Tolstoy seamlessly weaves together the lives of dozens of characters, and in doing so captures a breathtaking tapestry of late-nineteenth-century Russian society. 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."

Print length

976 pages
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English
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Modern Library
Publication date

October 10, 2000
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18 years and up
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5.15 x 1.4 x 7.9 inches
ISBN-10

9780679783305
ISBN-13

978-0679783305
Lexile measure

1080L
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Editorial Reviews

Review

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

From the Inside Flap

Considered by some to be the greatest novel ever written, Anna Karenina is Tolstoy's classic tale of love and adultery set against the backdrop of high society in Moscow and Saint Petersburg. A rich and complex masterpiece, the novel charts the disastrous course of a love affair between Anna, a beautiful married woman, and Count Vronsky, a wealthy army officer. Tolstoy seamlessly weaves together the lives of dozens of characters, and in doing so captures a breathtaking tapestry of late-nineteenth-century Russian society. 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."

From the Back Cover

Considered by some to be the greatest novel ever written, "Anna Karenina is Tolstoy's classic tale of love and adultery set against the backdrop of high society in Moscow and Saint Petersburg. A rich and complex masterpiece, the novel charts the disastrous course of a love affair between Anna, a beautiful married woman, and Count Vronsky, a wealthy army officer. Tolstoy seamlessly weaves together the lives of dozens of characters, and in doing so captures a breathtaking tapestry of late-nineteenth-century Russian society. 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."

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.

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.

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ 067978330X
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Modern Library; 1st edition (October 10, 2000)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 976 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 9780679783305
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0679783305
Reading age ‏ : ‎ 18 years and up
Lexile measure ‏ : ‎ 1080L
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.16 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.15 x 1.4 x 7.9 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #769,421 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Constance Garnett
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The subtitle of Richard Garnett's biography (reissued in Faber Finds) of his grandmother, Constance Garnett (1861-1946) is A Heroic Life. It couldn't be more apt. She remains the most prolific English translator of Russian literature: twelve volumes of Dostoevsky, five of Gogol, six of Herzen (his complete My Past and Thoughts), seventeen of Tchehov (her spelling), five of Tolstoy, eleven of Turgenev and so on. Many of these will be appearing in Faber Finds. In all she translated over sixty works. It is not, however, the sheer quantity that is to be celebrated, though that in itself is remarkable, it is more the enduring quality of her work. Of course there have been critics - translation is a peculiarly controversial subject, but there have been many more admirers. Tolstoy himself praised her. Of her Turgenev translations, Joseph Conrad said 'Turgeniev (sic) for me is Constance Garnett and Constance Garnett is Turgeniev'. Katherine Mansfield declared the lives of her generation of writers were transformed by Constance Garnett's translations, and H. E. Bates went so far as to say that modern English Literature itself could not have been what it is without her translations.
This extraordinary achievement was accomplished despite poor health and poor eyesight, the latter being ruined by her labours on War and Peace, a tragic if fitting sacrifice; her's indeed was A Heroic Life.
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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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Jen R

Such a great read!

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on March 8, 2015

Verified Purchase

4.5 stars

Oh Anna Karenina why have I not read you before now? Well I know why I didn't. I have had Anna Karenina on my to read list probably since the last movie came out. I remember seeing the preview for that and seeing Anna getting on a train all bundled up with snow on the ground and I just loved the imagery. I loved it so much I thought oh I should read this book (I didn't watch the movie though which now seems odd, but oh well). I knew next to nothing about the plot besides Anna has an affair with someone. That is it. So I put it on my to read list, but kept shying away from it. Why? Well I thought it would be really dense and heavy to read. It is a longer book and I thought it would take forever to get through since it would be really slow going. Man was I wrong! I loved it from the first page. Absolutely loved it. I will say if you do not enjoy it right away you might as well stop reading. It doesn't get "better." It is the same kind of ridiculous entertaining verbose story that goes off on great tangents all the time from the first page to the last. It was such a great read.

So as I said I was hooked from page one. The story just had me chuckling all the time. The people just seem so ridiculous! In a way that I loved. I love books set and/or written back in the day. I love reading what people thought at the time and see how characters act and whatnot. This book was just great for that. All of the main characters are just so fickle and I loved reading it. Although I will say the book is more about Levin than Anna. I see where Anna would be the title character since it is kind of about how she effects everyone else with what she does, but I wouldn't say the story is really about her. I loved Levin. I read some other reviews and saw that a lot of people did not enjoy all the farming talk from Levin in the country on his farm, but I loved it. Those were some of my favorite parts of the book. Levin in the fields harvesting his crops with the peasants, talking about farming and what he needs to do, etc. It was so interesting to me and I just really enjoyed him as a character and his views on things. I loved him from the start where he says how he loved this one family and

"He felt, as it were, that he had to be in love with one of the sisters, only he could not quite make out which."

How can you not love that? At first he thought he would love Dolly, but she married Stiva. Then the next sister, but she married quick too. That left Kitty so Kitty it was. It just entertains me so much to read stuff like this. Levin was no end to amusement with me. Really the whole book is like this. All the characters and everything that happens. Amazing.

Really I enjoyed reading most all of the characters. I loved how wishy washy they were. I loved how one look or one word would make them doubt their thoughts and feelings, but then two seconds later they would be sure again. It was a constant back and forth with all of them and it was great. Anna gets especially bad at this towards the end. Oh he loves me everything is great! Wait no, he tilted his head, he hates me and loves another! No wait, I am just being silly he loves me! And on and on. It was great. There were so many parts where I was just like this is amazing! This is so ridiculous and fun and I love it! The way everything is described, what happens, what people talk about, all of it was entertaining to me.

I don't really want to spoil anything if like me you managed to make it this far and not know what happens in this book so I don't want to talk to much about what happens. I will say there are a lot of tangents, a lot of snippets that don't necessarily need to be in there, a lot of random discussions and such that I can see where people might find it tedious, but I loved it. Sure there are discussions on politics and religion and such, but I enjoyed read them. Although I kind of wish it wouldn't have had the last section. I wish it would have ended the section before that as that to me was a perfect ending to the story. The last section didn't add much for me and I just kind of skimmed it, which is unfortunate since I was so enjoying the rest of the story. Really a great read that you should give a try. If you don't like it you don't like it, but if you love the first pages as I have you will love this book! It just gets better and better.

This review was originally posted to Jen in Bookland

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T.M. Reader

Does this great classic really live up to the hype?

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on February 3, 2013

Verified Purchase

In opening, I want to endorse the idea of reading this novel on Kindle. This is a lonnnggg novel, and using Kindle allows one to avoid lugging around a hardcopy the size of a toaster. And . . . Tolstoy's (or the translator's) vocabulary is extensive and includes the obscure and archaic. Kindle allows one to instantly display word definitions without continually reaching for the dictionary (small dictionarys won't have some of these words). I read 74% of the book (another Kindle benefit, tracking your completion percentage) on a two week cruise. The Kindle method was a huge plus.

Now, about Anna Karenina. It's wriiten second person, told from the perspective of the 19th century Russian ruling class. Most of the characters are titled, and/or landowners, and/or published, and so on. Several themes and subplots are at play. In no particular order: Assorted romantic arrangements with broken hearts, broken families, busted finances, shunning, trysts, and a rare exceptional success. The Balken war. The interplay between the ruling class and the peasant class. Religion and the nature of worship and God. Family and chidbirth. Work ethic. Horses and horse racing (in the absence of autos and auto racing). Substance abuse. Suicide. Good and bad advice. Foolish people.

That's all I'll say, avoiding re-explaining the plot. At the risk of incurring my readers' wrath, I will offer a few negative criticisms . . . .

The book could have achieved the same lessons and greatness without having been so darned long. Toward the last fourth or so, I was strongly impressed that the author was just "running on" and wasn't sure how, or if ever, he was going to wrap this up.

Secondly, Tolstoy really overdid it on the "knowing looks" and "reading his eyes" thing. Seemingly the characters could interpret no only truth or fiction, but often whole personalities and situations simply by a quick assessment of the gleam in their subject's eye. This was ubiquitous and became rather ridiculous. Would that I had such talent (really nobody does, at least as portrayed in the novel).

There are a BUNCH of characters, and the unfamiliar sounding Russian names don't help. I would like to say I had them all sorted out - but I don't think so.

And finally, the religion thing. Not a popular topic in book reviews, but it's not only in the novel, it is the culmination of the book. Tolstoy was a great mind, and took on a big responsibility in Anna Karenina to address the issues of religion, worship, and God. As Leon Uris was wont to do in Trinity, or William Golding in The Spire, Tolstoy shows thinly veiled and often witty disdain for organized religion and it's trappings, money, and control culture. I'm with him on this and felt that he came very, very close to defining true religion (in the Judeo-Christian sense). However, I'm a bit of a Bible scholar, and maintain that the great Tolstoy still missed hitting the bullseye. He dealt with ethical living, love for others, the "silent" but real presence of God and the quiet mysterious suggestions of what Christians refer to as the "Holy Spirit", but he was still inclined to sort out religion through the filter of what he had been raised in. He left a room unexplored - the much debated issue of obedience to God's commandments. Like 'em or hate 'em, they are there. I would like to have seen Tolstoy's thoughts on this . . . dealing for instance with issues sabbath-keeping (or not), or covetousness (present in the book), or with adultery (certainly present in this novel) - all these as weighed through the written requirements of the Judeo-Chritian scriptures. Again, not an easy subject, but Tolstoy was dealing with God and religion in spades as he closed the book. So how did the characters do (by inferrence, how are "we" doing?)

Great novel. Maybe a bit too long. Maybe not totally realistic or perfect - but close. Deals deeply and intelligently with a wide, wide, range of human topics.

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Caroline

Russian classic, but heavens it's dense

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on May 6, 2022

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After reading War and Peace last year, I though this would be a walk in the park. How wrong was I? There are many similar themes running through the 2 books; a loving family, a passionate unrequited first love, a young man struggling to find his meaning in life; a love of nature and observations about the fascinating minutiae of Russian society.

But heavens this book is dense. I found an hour's reading yielded 25 pages or so. And in those pages was a substantial amount of detail. Consider how many thoughts you have in one single day. How they veer around like a drunken bumper car. How, if you've had a knotty problem or an issue with someone that every action, reaction and course of action will be considered and ascribed meaning. Now put all that into a novel and you will understand just how dense this novel is.

If I never learn the many ways of harvesting hay, it will be too soon. At times this was more agricultural text book than 'The Archers' and I was bored.

Of course there are some wonderful moments - we see Russian society at its most political, it's bitchiest in its response to Anna. Anna, herself, is a wonderful character, beautiful and intelligent who eventually tears herself apart in considering the ways that Vronsky doesn't love her, ignoring that in fact he clearly does adore her.

But there are other elements of Anna's character that are not fleshed out - why does she pay no attention to her daughter? What causes self-possessed Anna to have such a crisis of confidence? This for me was never explained.

Instead Tolstoy chooses to focus on Levin, apparently a self-portrait and a man who thinks too damn much! Consider having won Kitty's affections and about to be married, has an introspective melt-down about the right shirt not being available and nearly calls the whole thing off. Thankfully he comes to his senses and spares the reader some 400 pages of soul-searching.

Sometimes books lose their hold on you as the years pass. For me the spell of Anna Karenina has been well and truly broken.

4 people found this helpful

Pet

Tedious and boring, has not stood the test of time

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on July 8, 2020

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I know it’s a classic - I’ve seen “Anna Karenina” plays, movies, ballet, opera and loved them all but this is just tedious and boring writing despite the gripping subject matter. It has not stood the test of time and the references to Russian struggles of the society at the time are largely lost as it contains no footnotes to explain the political situation and terminology to a 21-century reader. I couldn’t finish it.

6 people found this helpful

Mondoro

A good adaptation

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on August 31, 2012

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Trying to adapt a novel so rich in character and detail as 'Anna Karenina' in such a short compass is a daunting task, and inevitably there must be omissions. The secondary plot line of Levin and the Princess Kitty was chosen, and they are referred to only briefly on the third disc. This is a pity, as their relationship makes an important contrast to that of Anna and Vronsky. However, the adaptation successfully tells the central story of three essentially good people, Anna, Vronsky and Karenin, who become victims of a repressive social order that enshrines propriety and honour, and yet employs double standards to judge the behaviour of men and women. It uses Tolstoy's own technique of using multiple narrators providing different perpectives on the actions of the main characters, while linking together the various short scenes that make up the story. I would single out Alison Pettit's portrayal of the maid Annushka, a warm and sympathetic commentator on her mistress's plight. Turning to the three main characters, Teresa Gallagher has the dramatic range to move from peacemaker to her sister in law Dolly and her husband on the first disc to the woman driven to the depths of despair in the last disc. The last fifteen minutes of the recording are dramatically and brilliantly realised. Toby Stephens' presentation of Vronsky catches the complexity of the character suggested by Tolstoy; he is far from being the typical army officer. But it is Nicholas Farrell who emerges as the star in his portrayal of the conscientious but emotionally detached Karenin, labouring to create the new Russia in a period of repid change. To these principals I would add Cartolyn Jones' Princess Lydia, exhibiting the disngenuous piety of someone determined to do good, and the brittle nature of the sophisticated aristocratic milieu represented by Janet Maw's Princess Betsy. Credit should be given to Ed Thomasonm for including not just Tolstoy's remark about happy and unhappy families, but his observations about marriage relationships and the nature of Russian society, and indeed in conveying the esence of the novel in such a short space. I was minded to award four stars when Levin did not make an appearance, but the quality of the performance on disc has inclined me to give five stars.

3 people found this helpful

Katie Stevens

A wonderfully true, insightful classic

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on August 1, 2010

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This book was my first foray into Russian literature, and I could not have had a better introduction. Tolstoy has a way of phrasing the thoughts and feelings of the characters that is so insightful, precise and identifiable that it easily transcends the innumerable differences between a modern reader and the selection of people he focuses on living in nineteenth century Russia. They are all incredibly psychologically developed and I felt as if I knew them all personally and could predict how they might react in any given situation. Tolstoy also colours his narrative so that it is seen through the eyes of the different characters, giving the reader many different viewpoints from which to perceive events and settings and so making the novel very rich. A scene from the perspective of Oblonsky, for example, is light, frivolous and faintly cynical, whereas the same situation seen through Levin's eyes is thoughtful and earnest.

Unfortunately, while the human drama of the novel has stood the test of time admirably, much of Tolstoy's social commentary has not fared so well. The sections on social economy, agriculture and political systems may have ben fascinating to a contemporary Russian reader but I found them lengthy, tedious, unnecessary and, dare I say it, dull. However, I'm more than willing to ignore the effect of these passages in light of the sheer brilliance of the rest of the book.

This particular translation (Penguin, 1954, this edition 2000) by Rosemary Edmonds is fantastic. Her prose is readable and appropriate, so that the book does not read like translated literature at all, but like any other nineteenth century novel. The illusion was so well-executed that the only time I was made aware that I wasn't reading original language literature was when characters discussed which pronouns to use to refer to one another, an aspect of language which is absent from modern English. Both the translation and the original writing make this a thoroughly excellent book.

4 people found this helpful

Sarah KL

Kindle Edition - Wonderful!

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on December 5, 2010

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I'm reading this book due to being part of a book club. I probably would never have read it if it wasnt a)for the club and b) its a free download on the kindle. While I appreciate that the free edition is probably not as well translated as the more expensive editions, the story itself that Tolstoy creates goes beyond the mere difference in translation. The way he weaves a very complex yet deeply stimulating image of Russian society, politics, economics, history, values etc, and how that impacts on the normal lives of various people is incredible and realistic. How I wonder what Tolstoy would make of our modern society now!

What I also love is how Tolstoy gives us not just the actions of the characters, but there innermost thoughts and feelings as well - including the odd dog or two!!! Utterly wonderful to feel and know exactly what each character is going through and when a character such as Anna does not think of something, it shows just how far into denial she really is.

I'm totally spellbound by this book and encourage others to eat it up too.
Its a free kindle download, so you'd be daft not too!

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