Anna Karenina

By (author) Tolstoy Leo; Introduction by Pevear Richard
Short description/annotation:
Anna Karenina seems to have everything - beauty, wealth, popularity and an adored son. But she feels that her life is empty until the moment she encounters the impetuous officer Count Vronsky. Their subsequent affair scandalizes society and family alike and soon brings jealously and bitterness in its wake.
Description:

Tolstoy''s epic novel of love, destiny and self-destruction, in a gorgeous new clothbound edition from Penguin Classics.

Anna Karenina seems to have everything - beauty, wealth, popularity and an adored son. But she feels that her life is empty until the moment she encounters the impetuous officer Count Vronsky. Their subsequent affair scandalizes society and family alike and soon brings jealously and bitterness in its wake. Contrasting with this tale of love and self-destruction is the vividly observed story of Levin, a man striving to find contentment and a meaning to his life - and also a self-portrait of Tolstoy himself.

This acclaimed modern translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky won the PEN/ Book of the Month Club Translation Prize in 2001. Their translation is accompanied in this edition by an introduction by Richard Pevear and a preface by John Bayley

''The new and brilliantly witty translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky is a must'' - Lisa Appignanesi, Independent, Books of the Year

''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, New Yorker

Review quote:
The new and brilliantly witty translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky is a must
Review quote:
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"
Biographical note:
Richard Pevear, along with his wife Larissa Volokhonsky, has translated works by Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Chekhov, Gogol, Bulgakov and Pasternak. They both were twice awarded the PEN/Book-of-the-Month Club Translation Prize (for Dostoevsky''s The Brothers Karamazov and Tolstoy''s Anna Karenina). They are married and live in France.
Promotional headline:
Anna Karenina seems to have everything - beauty, wealth, popularity and an adored son. But she feels that her life is empty until the moment she encounters the impetuous officer Count Vronsky.

Excerpt:
All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
    All was confusion in the Oblonskys'' house. The wife had found out that the husband was having an affair with their former French governess, and had announced to the husband that she could not live in the same house with him. This situation had continued for three days now, and was painfully felt by the couple themselves, as well as by all the members of the family and household. They felt that there was no sense in their living together and that people who meet accidentally at any inn have more connection with each other than they, the members of the family and household of the Oblonskys. The wife would not leave her rooms, the husband was away for the third day. The children were running all over the house as if lost; the English governess quarrelled with the housekeeper and wrote a note to a friend, asking her to find her a new place; the cook had already left the premises the day before, at dinner-time; the kitchen-maid and coachman had given notice.
    On the third day after the quarrel, Prince Stepan Arkadyich Oblonsky — Stiva, as he was called in society — woke up at his usual hour, t