Synopses & Reviews
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 must endure 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, quality of Tolstoy's writing, Pevear and Volokhonsky have produced a translation true to his powerful voice. This award-winning team's authoritative edition also includes an illuminating introduction and explanatory notes. Beautiful, vigorous, and eminently readable, this Anna Karenina will be the definitive text for generations to come.
Review
"Pevear and Volokhonsky...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....[S]ucceeds in bringing Tolstoy's masterpiece to life once again." Library Journal
Review
"The first English translation in 40 years, [this] Anna Karenina is the most scrupulous, illuminating and compelling version yet." Portland Oregonian
Review
"Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky have received honors for their translations...[this] contribution will doubtless be welcomed with equal enthusiasm. " San Diego Union-Tribune
Review
"Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky have...retain[ed] the flavor of [Tolstoy's] unique voice." Dallas Morning News
Review
"Pevear and Volokhonsky are at once scrupulous translators and vivid stylists of English, and their superb rendering allows us, as perhaps never before, to grasp the palpability of Tolstoy's 'characters, acts, situations.'" James Wood, The New Yorker
Review
"At last, a version of Tolstoy's great novel that is neither musty, nor overly modernized, nor primly recast as a Victorian landscape. With their unusual fastidious precision for Russian contexts and modes of address, the prizewinning Pevear/Volokhonsky team has given us a pellucid Anna Karenina that speaks (as Tolstoy himself wished to speak) from within its own time, but for all times." Caryl Emerson, Princeton University
About the Author
Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910) wrote two of Russia's greatest novels, War and Peace (1869) and Anna Karenina (1877), as well as many short stories and essays.
Reading Group Guide
1. How are we to understand the epigram "Vengeance is mine, I will repay"? Should Anna's fate be considered the result of God's vengeance? Is Anna's desire to take vengeance on Vronsky being condemned?
2. When Vronsky first meets Anna, "it was as if a surplus of something so overflowed her being that it expressed itself beyond her will..." (p. 61). What is this something? Why is it expressed beyond her will?
3. Why is Anna able to reconcile Stiva and Dolly?
4. We are told that it is unpleasant for Anna to read about other people's lives because she "wanted too much to live herself" (p. 100). Why are reading and living placed in opposition to one another?
5. When Anna and Vronsky have satisfied their desire for one another, why does Tolstoy compare Vronsky to a murderer?
6. After telling her husband about her affair, why does Anna feel that "everything was beginning to go double in her soul" (p. 288)?
7. Why does Tolstoy counterpose Levin and Kitty's marriage with Anna and Vronsky's relationship?
8. Why does Levin continually imagine his future in such detail, only to have his actual experience differ from what he had expected?
9. What keeps Dolly from having an affair like Anna's, even though she imagines one "parallel to it, an almost identical love affair of her own" (p. 609)?
10. While explaining her affair to Dolly, Anna says, "I simply want to live; to cause no evil to anyone but myself" (p. 616). Does the novel present these two objectives as compatible or incompatible?
11. Why, as she later admits to herself, did Anna want Levin to fall in love with her when she met him?
12. Why does Anna kill herself? Why does everyone and everything seem so ugly to Anna just before she does so?
13. Is it Anna herself or the society in which she lives that is more responsible for her unhappiness?
14. Why are the consequences of Stiva's adultery so insignificant relative to those Anna faces?
15. Why does Vronsky go to war as a volunteer after Anna's suicide?
16. Of all the novel's characters, why is it only Anna and Levin who contemplate suicide?
17. Why does Levin believe that he must keep the revelation in which he comes to understand faith a secret from Kitty?
18. Why does Tolstoy end the novel with Levin's musings about the nature of faith and his embrace of morally justifiable actions as the basis for the meaning of life?
Powell's Staff on PowellsBooks.Blog
Here are our 2018 Reading Resolutions....
Read More»
Powell's Staff on PowellsBooks.Blog
It’s clear that the best new releases of 2018 have been eclectic, bold, and imaginative, with a sharp eye on social realities and a desire to expose the humor, beauty, and possibility that underlie our lives...
Read More»