Synopses & Reviews
At its simplest,
Anna Karenina is a love story. It is a portrait of a beautiful and intelligent woman whose passionate love for a handsome officer sweeps aside all other ties - to her marriage and to the network of relationships and moral values that bind the society around her. The love affair of Anna and Vronsky is played out alongside the developing romance of Kitty and Levin, and in the character of Levin, closely based on Tolstoy himself, the search for happiness takes on a deeper philosophical significance.
One of the greatest novels ever written, Anna Karenina combines penetrating psychological insight with an encyclopedic depiction of Russian life in the 1870s. The novel takes us from high society St Petersburg to the threshing fields on Levin's estate, with unforgettable scenes at a Moscow ballroom, the skating rink, a race course, a railway station. It creates an intricate labyrinth of connections that is profoundly satisfying, and deeply moving.
Rosamund Bartlett's new translation conveys Tolstoy's precision of meaning and emotional accuracy in an English version that is highly readable and stylistically faithful. Like her acclaimed biography of Tolstoy, it is vivid, nuanced, and compelling.
Review
"Rosamund Bartlett's achievement is magnificent. In particular, her translations of the descriptive passages are miniature masterpieces. The translation is fresh and immediate, but with all the elegance and power of the original."
--Amy Mandelker, CUNY Graduate Center
"Rosamund Bartlett's riveting new translation of Anna Karenina brings the reader into Tolstoy's many-faceted worlds with an immediacy, majesty and clarity that no other translator of this great novel has ever achieved. At the same time she represents "the idiosyncrasy of Tolstoy's inimitable style" through idiomatic, natural English. Whether it is Levin's series of epiphanies, the intimate workings of Anna's mind and heart, or the ever-present, sustaining worlds of families and of nature--the sky, the meadows, the bees or other creatures of the animal kingdom--each of Tolstoy's interlocking realms is powerfully yet exquisitely rendered by one of the finest translators of our time. Bartlett's Anna Karenina, with its brilliant introductory essay, explanatory notes and bibliography, will be the go-to English version of Tolstoy's--indeed the world's-precious masterpiece.
--Robin Feuer Miller, Brandeis University
"Bartlett, a talented stylist, succeeds in crafting an aesthetically pleasing translation that reads naturally in English..." -- Chicago Tribune
"Ms. Bartlett, the author of a superb biography of Tolstoy, has produced a more classically elegant translation, which is mirrored in the book's beautiful packaging, right down to the sewn-in ribbon bookmark. (Her introduction, a tour d'horizon of Tolstoy's life and work, is also excellent.)" -- Wall Street Journal
About the Author
Rosamund Bartlett has published widely in the fields of Russian literature and music. Her books include
Wagner and Russia (CUP) and
Shostakovitch in Context (OUP), as well as biographies of Chekhov and Tolstoy. Her life of Tolstoy was longlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize. As a translator she has published the first unexpurgated edition of Chekhov's letters for Penguin Classics, and her translation of Chekhov's short stories,
About Love and Other Stories, for Oxford World's Classics was shortlisted for the Oxford Weidenfeld Translation Prize. She was until 2006 Reader and Head of Department of Russian at the University of Durham, and she is the Founding Director of the Anton Chekhov Foundation, set up to preserve Chekhov's house in Yalta, for which she was awarded the Chekhov 150th Anniversary Medal in 2010 by the Russian government.
Table of Contents
Introduction
Note on the Text and Translation
Select Bibliography
A Chronology of Leo Tolstoy
Principal Characters and Guide to Pronunciation
ANNA KARENINA
PART ONE
PART TWO
PART THREE
PART FOUR
PART FIVE
PART SIX
PART SEVEN
PART EIGHT
Explanatory Notes