Leo Tolstoy - Anna Karenina (Penguin Classics)

ANNA KARENINA

William Faulkner, its said, was once asked to name the three
best novels ever. He replied: Anna Karenina, Anna Karenina,
Anna Karenina. If you dont recall why, rush to buy a fine new
translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky
Boyd Tonkin, Independent

If theres such a thing as a definitive translation, this might be
it Jean Dubail, Cleveland Plain Dealer

All happy families will receive a copy of this new translation this
Christmas; each unhappy family will want one Eric Griffiths,
Evening Standard

The newest English-language translation by Richard Pevear and
Larissa Volokhonsky is a significant achievement They have
applied their hands-off, no-nonsense idea of translation the
shining result is that Tolstoys book reads as if it could have been
written yesterday Ingrid Lunden, San Francisco Chronicle

Tolstoys greatness lies in not turning the story into sentimental
tragedy His world is huge and vast, filled with complex
family lives and great social events. His characters are well
rounded presences. They have complete passions: a desire for
love, but also an inner moral depth Malcolm Bradbury,
Mail on Sunday

Its so fantastic that it can be read over and over again I dont
know any other writer who is so adept at peopling their
pages Maggie OFarrell, Daily Mail, Desert Island Books

COUNT LEO TOLSTOY was born in 1828 at Yasnaya Polyana, in the Tula province, and educated privately. He studied Oriental languages and law at the University of Kazan, then led a life of pleasure until 1851 when he joined an artillery regiment in the Caucasus. He took part in the Crimean War and after the defence of Sebastopol he wrote The Sebastopol Sketches (18556), which established his reputation. After a period in St Petersburg and abroad, where he studied educational methods for use in his school for peasant children in Yasnaya Polyana, he married Sofya Andreyevna Behrs in 1862. The next fifteen years was a period of great happiness; they had thirteen children, and Tolstoy managed his vast estates in the Volga Steppes, continued his educational projects, cared for his peasants and wrote War and Peace (1869) and Anna Karenina (1877). A Confession (187982) marked a spiritual crisis in his life; he became an extreme moralist and in a series of pamphlets after 1880 expressed his rejection of state and church, indictment of the weaknesses of the flesh and denunciation of private property. His teaching earned him numerous followers at home and abroad, but also much opposition, and in 1901 he was excommunicated by the Russian Holy Synod. He died in 1910, in the course of a dramatic flight from home, at the small railway station of Astapovo.

RICHARD PEVEAR and LARISSA VOLOKHONSKY have translated Bulgakovs The Master and Margarita for Penguin Classics, and produced acclaimed translations of Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky and Gogol. Their translation of The Brothers Karamazov won the 1991 PEN Book of the Month Club Translation Prize.

JOHN BAYLEY (CBE 1999) was Warton Professor of English Literature, Oxford University, from 197492. Among his many books are The Characters of Love: A Study in the Literature of Personality; Tolstoy and the Novel; Pushkin: A Comparative Commentary; Shakespeare and Tragedy; Iris: A Memoir of Iris Murdoch; Iris and the Friends: A Year of Memories; and a detailed study of A. E. Housmans poems. Alice (1994), The Queer Captain (1995) and Georges Lair (1996) are his trilogy of novels. For Penguin Classics he has introduced Pushkins Tales of Belkin and Other Prose Writings and Eugene Onegin and edited Henry Jamess The Wings of the Dove.

LEO TOLSTOY

A NOVEL IN EIGHT PARTS

Translated by RICHARD PEVEAR
and LARISSA VOLOKHONSKY
With a Preface by JOHN BAYLEY

PENGUIN BOOKS

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First published in Russian, 18737
This edition first published by Allen Lane The Penguin Press 2000
Published in Penguin Classics 2001
Reprinted with new Preface 2003
1

Translation and editorial matter copyright Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, 2000
Preface copyright John Bayley, 2003
All rights reserved

The moral right of the translators has been asserted

Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject
to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent,
re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publishers
prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in
which it is published and without a similar condition including this
condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

EISBN: 9780141902838

Devoted readers of Tolstoy, and there are a great many of them, would find it hard to say which of his two great novels is their particular favourite. They are very different from each other, although neither could have been written by anyone else. Tolstoy himself always claimed that War and Peace was not a novel at all, as the West understands the term, but a form unique to himself, and only possible in Russia; whereas Anna Karenina he described to a friend as this novel, the first I have attempted Later in his long life he claimed that neither had any value, because all that mattered was God and the Truth, and the search to find them. But there is some irony in the fact that Tolstoys later parables and polemical works are not much read today, whereas his two great novels if for convenience we can agree to call them that remain as popular as ever.

Tolstoy began to write Anna Karenina between four and five years after the completion and publication of War and Peace, and he began it, as he claimed, partly as a result of an accident. A woman threw herself under a train near his country estate of Yasnaya Polyana, and Tolstoy was involved in the subsequent inquiry. Jealousy and an unhappy love affair were involved, and led Tolstoy to reflect very seriously on the role of love and marriage in society. Then one evening he happened to be reading to his children a story by Pushkin, and was filled with admiration at the terseness and simplicity of its opening. That is how one should write, he exclaimed, and the famous beginning of Anna Karenina may well have been suggested by that moment.

All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. A wonderful opening it is; and it has never been better translated than by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky in this edition. At one stroke, and in a single sentence, we are brought into the heart and soul of the story: family life and the lives led by the separate members of families. Everyone in the novel knows all about the others; many are related. It is of importance, for example, that Dollys feckless and charming husband, Stiva Oblonsky, is also Annas brother. What is acceptable, or at least excusable, in his behaviour is culpable and ultimately fatal in hers. And in revealing this, as it were, Tolstoy and his novel are far from endorsing what used to be called the double standard of sexual morality. When D. H. Lawrence said that Anna and Vronsky should have defied and banished the world by going away together, he was thinking of himself and his own wife Frieda, with whom he ran away and afterwards married, and he was missing the point. The point that the novel makes is that Anna and Vronsky