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Anna Karenina (The Margellos World Republic of Letters) Kindle Edition

by Leo Tolstoy (Author), Gary Saul Morson (Editor), Marian Schwartz (Translator) Format: Kindle Edition
4.5 4.5 out of 5 stars 122 ratings
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Tolstoy produced many drafts of Anna Karenina. Crafting and recrafting each sentence with careful intent, he was anything but casual in his use of language. His project, translator Marian Schwartz observes, “was to bend language to his will, as an instrument of his aesthetic and moral convictions.” In her magnificent new translation, Schwartz embraces Tolstoy’s unusual style—she is the first English language translator ever to do so. Previous translations have departed from Tolstoy’s original, “correcting” supposed mistakes and infelicities. But Schwartz uses repetition where Tolstoy does, wields a judicious cliché when he does, and strips down descriptive passages as he does, re-creating his style in English with imagination and skill.

Tolstoy’s romantic Anna, long-suffering Karenin, dashing Vronsky, and dozens of their family members, friends, and neighbors are among the most vivid characters in world literature. In the thought-provoking Introduction to this volume, Gary Saul Morson provides unusual insights into these characters, exploring what they reveal about Tolstoy’s radical conclusions on romantic love, intellectual dishonesty, the nature of happiness, the course of true evil, and more. For readers at every stage—from students first encountering Anna to literary professionals revisiting the novel—this volume will stand as the English reader’s clear first choice.
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  1. Part of series
    The Margellos World Republic of Letters
  2. Print length
    793 pages
  3. Language
    English
  4. Sticky notes
    On Kindle Scribe
  5. Publisher
    Yale University Press
  6. Publication date
    November 28, 2014
  7. File size
    3399 KB
  8. Page Flip
    Enabled
  9. Word Wise
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  10. Enhanced typesetting
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Editorial Reviews

Review

Longlisted for the 2015 American Literary Translators Asssociation, National Translation Prize in Prose.  -- NTA ― National Translation Awards Published On: 2015-07-18

“If there is a Tolstoyan out there who is interested in reading a translation that is exquisitely mindful of the book’s complex texture, or someone who has meant to get to Karenina but hasn’t yet got around to this particular pleasure, Schwartz’s tribute to Tolstoy’s craft and sensitivity should be at the top of the list.”—Jim Kates, Arts Fuse -- Jim Kates ― Arts Fuse

“The translation is the most accurate Tolstoy we have in English. Marian Schwartz has been a major force in bringing Russian literature into English for many years, but this is her masterpiece.”—Michael Holquist, author of Dostoevsky and the Novel -- Michael Holquist

Review

"Tolstoy did not wish to please; he wished to correct, instruct, inspire, persuade.  And as Marian Schwartz notes, he “wholly intended to bend language to his will.”  In her astonishing new translation, she takes seriously Tolstoy’s disgust with smooth Russian literary style, setting a new standard in English for accuracy to Tolstoyan repetition, sentence density and balance, stripped-down vocabulary and enhanced moral weight. A rough, powerful, unromantic Anna that wakes the reader up and rings true."—Caryl Emerson, Princeton University -- Caryl Emerson

Product details

  • ASIN ‏ : ‎ B00OZN92V6
  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Yale University Press (November 28, 2014)
  • Publication date ‏ : ‎ November 28, 2014
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • File size ‏ : ‎ 3399 KB
  • Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
  • Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
  • Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
  • Print length ‏ : ‎ 793 pages
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.5 4.5 out of 5 stars 122 ratings

About the authors

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  1. Leo Tolstoy

    Leo Tolstoy

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    Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910) wrote two of the great novels of the nineteenth century, War and Peace and Anna Karenina.

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  2. Marian Schwartz

    Marian Schwartz

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    Marian Schwartz translates Russian classic and contemporary fiction, history, biography, criticism, and fine art. She is the principal English translator of the works of Nina Berberova and translated the New York Times’ bestseller The Last Tsar, by Edvard Radzinsky, as well as classics by Mikhail Bulgakov, Ivan Goncharov, Yuri Olesha, Mikhail Lermontov, and Leo Tolstoy. Her most recent publications are Polina Dashkova's Madness Treads Lightly, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's March 1917: The Red Wheel, Node III, Book 1, and Leonid Yuzefovich’s Horsemen of the Sands. She is a past president of the American Literary Translators Association and the recipient of two National Endowment for the Arts translation fellowships and numerous prizes, including the 2014 Read Russia Prize for Contemporary Russian Literature, the 2016 Soeurette Diehl Frasier Award from the Texas Institute of Letters, and the 2018 Linda Gaboriau Award for Translation from the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity. https://www.marianschwartz.com/

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Customer reviews

4.5 out of 5 stars
4.5 out of 5
122 global ratings

Top reviews from the United States

Steve Schwartz, Greenville
5.0 out of 5 stars You may find yourself chortling.
Reviewed in the United States on January 14, 2015
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Again, I'm the translator's brother, just to tell you up front. However, if I had hated the result, I wouldn't have said anything. I know no Russian beyond the words blini, nitchevo, Kremlin, and spasibo, the phrase "Where is the American consulate?" and whatever Boris and Natasha spoke. The only other translation I've read is the one by Constance Garnett, mainly because that was the one most widely available 'way back when. My sister admires Garnett, although her translation differs significantly. To me, all of the Garnett translations sound alike -- Tolstoy the same as Dostoyevsky and so on. I doubt this is true for those who know Russian. However, translations also generally reflect their times. Pope's Iliad, a magnificent achievement, has little in common with the one by Robert Fagles (my Iliad of choice), and the differences come down to changes in aesthetics. A Karenina translator, after all, should at least convince his target readers that they're poring over a masterpiece, and our notions of great literature change over time.

Since I have a special interest, I've read quite a few reviews of this book, some of which seem to me wrong-headed. Some want the translator to produce a "flavor" of that Russian grammar -- a pitfall that usually traps the academic reviewer. English and Russian grammar differ by quite a bit, according to everything I've read. For me, the question is always "How would you say this in English?" It turns out that such a question, while basic, has no easy answer.

To anticipate Passover: Why is this Anna Karenina different from all other Anna Kareninas? Since I haven't read the others -- after the Garnett, there are at least four other major ones -- I can compare my sister only to Garnett. My sister's far more readable, for one thing. The prose flies. I can fairly call it a page-turner. I was surprised at how funny it is, how much satire Tolstoy packs in. Garnett seems rather dour in comparison. Also, my sister works with the most recently completed scholarly edition of the text.

The major change from other versions, however, is discussed in the translator's introduction. Tolstoy, as a conscious stylistic choice, stripped his vocabulary of synonyms. That is, he used the same word again and again in a short space. Since some mandarins of English style consider repetition a stylistic mistake, many translators, trying "to save Tolstoy from himself," have varied the repetitions by substituting synonyms and even euphemisms. However, Tolstoy was reacting against precisely this kind of elegance. Indeed, he considered it immoral. This version emphasizes the repetitions, and the effect is that you get Tolstoy's attitude toward each character without him ever explicitly saying this one is good and this one is bad as well as the issues that Tolstoy considers important. The book changes from a romance about a woman who sacrifices all for love to a passionate vision of what makes a good society.

Gary Saul Morson provides a brilliant, erudite introduction to the work -- pure lagniappe.
30 people found this helpful
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William McKeldin Jr.
5.0 out of 5 stars ANNA KARENINA by Leo Tolstoy, translated by Marian Schwartz (Yale University Press, 2014).
Reviewed in the United States on December 10, 2015
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ANNA KARENINA by Leo Tolstoy, translated by Marian Schwartz (Yale University Press, 2014).

I purchased both new translations of Tolstoy's ANNA KARENINA (the other being Rosamund Bartlett's published by Oxford, also in 2014) because when I read it three years ago in the Louise and Alymer Maude translation, I couldn't get it out of my head for quite some time. I wanted to re-read it, and I thought new translations were the ideal excuse for doing so. The Maude translation, by the way, I thought was excellent -- no complaints there (though I'm no expert). I try to steer away from the Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky translations simply because they read *like* translations to my eye and ear... but to each his own!

I have finished the Bartlett translation and thoroughly enjoyed it, but I've only spot checked certain passages from Schwartz's... it strikes me, with my limited sampling, that it is quite different, but equally good (each translation of an unhappy story is unhappy in its own way, I suppose). What makes this edition of ANNA KARENINA stand out for me is the fascinating, thought provoking, and, in the final analysis, entirely irksome polemical introduction by Gary Saul Morson. Prof. Morson appears to have an axe to grind in the so-called culture-wars, and we are on different sides. I was so taken by his introduction that I did a cursory Google search which confirmed my initial feeling. But if I could go back and be an undergraduate again, I would want to take his course on Russian Lit at Northwestern... if only so I could argue with him. It's very rare that I have such a visceral reaction to an introduction. I'm very grateful for that... and to Prof. Morson for challenging my own accepted ideas about this novel and the people who inhabit it.

While it would be unfair for me to compare a translation I've read in its entirety to one I've only spot-checked, I suspect that I will enjoy Marian Schwartz's as much - if in a different way - as Rosamund Bartlett's. A first time reader could choose either with confidence (or the old Maude translation, for that matter!).
8 people found this helpful
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Zine B. Smith
4.0 out of 5 stars Tolstoy Says Enough for Commentary
Reviewed in the United States on June 9, 2023
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Long with many entangled characters. The main character is the title and should be the focus in reading. She is easily lost.
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James Scurlock
5.0 out of 5 stars Good binging delivered on time in perfect condition!
Reviewed in the United States on November 22, 2022
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I liked everything about the book, print size, binding, translation, etc. I'm reading it.
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Boris
5.0 out of 5 stars Profoundly Moving Masterpiece
Reviewed in the United States on April 24, 2015
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A magnificent epic novel of the eponymous unhappily married protagonist's heart wrenching tale, when she succumbs to the passion of her equally besotted lover, is masterfully interwoven and contrasted with the physical and psychological portraits of two other families: one bitterly unhappy and the other a joyful union of two true soulmates, yet whose profound marital joy does not preclude petty quarrels, misunderstandings, and jealousies, as real life cannot fulfill the idealized expectations of wedded bliss of even the happiest and best-suited of couples. These personal dramas are set against the historic transformation of Russia, the decline of the aristocracy, political and philosophical debates, exquisite and finely drawn landscapes of the Russian countryside throughout the seasons of the year, and a vast cast whose psychological portraits are so finely drawn that even minor characters are three-dimensional. The omniscient narrator shifts seamlessly among the lives and happenings of the variegated worlds within worlds that subtly take shape and effortlessly shifts among the viewpoints of his vast cast as events unfold. Portents of Anna's doom are artfully inserted from the novel's beginning, but the foreshadowing only makes her tragic denouement more poignant.
6 people found this helpful
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Top reviews from other countries

Maria
5.0 out of 5 stars Finally, a worthy translation!
Reviewed in Canada on December 1, 2020
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I wish Marian Schwartz could translate all of Tolstoy -- she gets his rhythm and structure right, compared to all the other English translations I've come across. She does not take creative liberties with Tolstoy's language (unlike the other translators), which is very important, because the English-language reader can finally see how he intended the structure of his sentences to flow -- for example, other translators find it necessary to substitute words he repeats with synonyms -- this totally takes away from the intended repetition and the rhythm of the idea -- Schwartz keeps things as close to the original, as possible.

The introduction written by Gary Saul Morson is a gem! He gets the novel completely and breaks it down into themes very accurately and effectively. The introduction alone is worth getting this translation for!
3 people found this helpful
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ItsAllAboutMe
1.0 out of 5 stars DON'T get the Kindle version
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on July 7, 2023
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Kindle version is full of ridiculous typos, it may be free but it will irritate you. I got as far as Chapter 24 which started "Yes, there is something in be hatful, repulsive," thought Levin... DNF'd at that point and spent some Amazon credits on the Bartlett translation.
BTW Chapter 24 in the Bartlett version starts "Yes, there is something loathsome and repellent about me," thought Levin...
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