Anna Karenina: Leo Tolstoy - Softcover

Tolstoy, Leo

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0140449175 ISBN 13: 9780140449174

Publisher: Penguin Classics, 2003

'One of the greatest love stories in world literature' Vladimir Nabokov

The heroine of Tolstoy's epic of love and self-destruction, Anna Karenina has beauty, wealth, popularity and an adored son, but feels that her life is empty until she encounters the impetuous officer Count Vronsky. Their subsequent affair scandalizes society and family alike, and brings jealousy and bitterness in its wake. Contrasting with this 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 award-winning translation has been acclaimed as the definitive English version of Tolstoy's masterpiece.

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

Review:

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)

About the Author:

Leo Tolstoy (Author)
Leo Tolstoy was born in 1828 in the Tula province. He studied at the University of Kazan, then led a life of pleasure until 1851 when he joined an artillery regiment in the Caucasus. He established his reputation as a writer with The Sebastopol Sketches (1855-6). After a period in St Petersburg and abroad, he married, had thirteen children, managed his vast estates in the Volga Steppes and wrote War and Peace (1869) and Anna Karenina (1877). A Confession (1879-82) marked a spiritual crisis in his life, and in 1901 he was excommuincated by the Russian Holy Synod. He died in 1910, in the course of a dramatic flight from home, at the railway station of Astapovo.

Richard Pevear (Introducer, Translator)
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.

Larissa Volokhonsky (Translator)
Larissa Volokhonsky, along with her husband Richard Pevear, 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.

• Publisher: Penguin Classics
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 0140449175
• ISBN 13: 9780140449174
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 864