Anna Karenina (Tolstoy)

Book Reviews
Powerful, tragic (you know what happens, right?), and one of the greatest reads in all of literature. Outwardly, Anna Karenina is the story of a woman who struggles to break free of one web—marriage—only to find herself entrapped in another web. The latter, is more pernicious than the first.
A LitLovers LitPick (April '08)


The first English translation in 40 years, [this] Anna Karenina is the most scrupulous, illuminating and compelling version yet.
San Diego Union


(Refers to Penguin edition) 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 Woods - The New Yorker


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. —Ron Ratliff, Kansas State Univ., Manhattan, KS.
Library Journal