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Anna Karenina:
Anna Karenina (Oprah's Book Club): (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition)
The must-have Pevear and Volokhonsky translation of one of the greatest Russian novels ever written
Described by William Faulkner as the best novel ever written and by Fyodor Dostoevsky as “flawless,” Anna Karenina tells of the doomed love affair between the sensuous and rebellious Anna and the dashing officer, Count Vronsky. Tragedy unfolds as Anna rejects her passionless marriage and thereby exposes herself to the hypocrisies of society. Set against a vast and richly textured canvas of nineteenth-century Russia, the novel's seven major characters create a dynamic imbalance, playing out the contrasts of city and country life and all the variations on love and family happiness.
While previous versions have softened the robust and sometimes shocking qualities of Tolstoy's writing, Pevear and Volokhonsky have produced a translation true to his powerful voice. This authoritative edition, which received the PEN Translation Prize and was an Oprah Book Club™ selection, also includes an illuminating introduction and explanatory notes. Beautiful, vigorous, and eminently readable, this Anna Karenina will be the definitive text for fans of the film and generations to come. This Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition also features French flaps and deckle-edged paper.
For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.
The must-have Pevear and Volokhonsky translation of one of the greatest Russian novels ever written
Described by William Faulkner as the best novel ever written and by Fyodor Dostoevsky as “flawless,” Anna Karenina tells of the doomed love affair between the sensuous and rebellious Anna and the dashing officer, Count Vronsky. Tragedy unfolds as Anna rejects her passionless marriage and thereby exposes herself to the hypocrisies of society. Set against a vast and richly textured canvas of nineteenth-century Russia, the novel's seven major characters create a dynamic imbalance, playing out the contrasts of city and country life and all the variations on love and family happiness.
While previous versions have softened the robust and sometimes shocking qualities of Tolstoy's writing, Pevear and Volokhonsky have produced a translation true to his powerful voice. This authoritative edition, which received the PEN Translation Prize and was an Oprah Book Club™ selection, also includes an illuminating introduction and explanatory notes. Beautiful, vigorous, and eminently readable, this Anna Karenina will be the definitive text for fans of the film and generations to come. This Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition also features French flaps and deckle-edged paper.
For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.
1179 pages, Kindle Edition
Published July 26, 2023
16 people are currently reading
13 people want to read
About the author
Leo Tolstoy
7,942 books28.4k followersLev Nikolayevich Tolstoy (Russian: Лев Николаевич Толстой; most appropriately used Liev Tolstoy; commonly Leo Tolstoy in Anglophone countries) was a Russian writer who primarily wrote novels and short stories. Later in life, he also wrote plays and essays. His two most famous works, the novels War and Peace and Anna Karenina, are acknowledged as two of the greatest novels of all time and a pinnacle of realist fiction. Many consider Tolstoy to have been one of the world's greatest novelists. Tolstoy is equally known for his complicated and paradoxical persona and for his extreme moralistic and ascetic views, which he adopted after a moral crisis and spiritual awakening in the 1870s, after which he also became noted as a moral thinker and social reformer.
His literal interpretation of the ethical teachings of Jesus, centering on the Sermon on the Mount, caused him in later life to become a fervent Christian anarchist and anarcho-pacifist. His ideas on nonviolent resistance, expressed in such works as The Kingdom of God Is Within You, were to have a profound impact on such pivotal twentieth-century figures as Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr.
His literal interpretation of the ethical teachings of Jesus, centering on the Sermon on the Mount, caused him in later life to become a fervent Christian anarchist and anarcho-pacifist. His ideas on nonviolent resistance, expressed in such works as The Kingdom of God Is Within You, were to have a profound impact on such pivotal twentieth-century figures as Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr.
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Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews
October 11, 2025
Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy, one of the most important masterpieces created by man http://realini.blogspot.com/2017/04/a...
10 out of 10
With the war launched by Putin, to wipe out Ukraine from the map and add it to his would be empire, there have been calls to boycott not just oligarchs, Russian oil and gas (which alas, is still needed) but also some of the greatest luminaries, creators that the world has and happen to be Russian, like Leo Tolstoy, with reference to some of the less savory texts written by the count, or some of the other luminaries form the same outré country…he talks about ‘the Russification of Poland’ in this novel, though not arguing in favor of it, in the context of war, who has the right to launch it (the government) there is a wider argument over what happens when the people disagree with that action…
Indeed, at over eight hundred pages of magnum opus, we have the chance to read opinions, suggestions, points of view on almost anything under the sun, and when various characters talk, they touch on religion, politics, differences between the rich and the poor, with emphasis on love (obviously, this is about the dramatic entanglement between Anna Karenina and count Alexei Vronsky) this reader had been cautious in entering this phenomenal universe in part because of the aforementioned war (I was also curious to see what the effect would be, will I reject Tolstoy and hence others, because they are compatriots of the Putin Monster) and also I hate to know what happens.
And everybody is aware of the tragic destiny of the heroine (if not, well, spoiler alerts need to be included) who decides upon a gruesome ending…we have been most fortunate to have a magnificent, glorious professor of Literature, Anton Chevorchian, in high school, and among the many things, tales he told us, he referred to ‘naturalism’ and the manner in which artists of that trend would approach the death of Anna Karenina, insisting on what happens after the blow from the train, details that they would give, and that example has stayed with me for more than forty years, to this day actually
There was another argument against taking on this massive work (the more than eight hundred pages are indeed another cautionary signal) and that will refer to the personality, the character of Leo Tolstoy, exposed in the marvelous Intellectuals by brilliant Paul Johnson http://realini.blogspot.com/2014/06/i... who has looked at Henrik Ibsen, Ernest Hemingway, Jean-Jacques Rousseau (the latter has abandoned his children at the door of an orphanage, at a time when nine out of ten would die in that circumstance) and Tolstoy himself, concluding that these titanic writers would have a very dark, repugnant side, which for some could make sense…
Maybe the most fantastic thinker, and somehow also comedian, that we have is Andrei Plesu http://realini.blogspot.com/2022/05/d... one that has the sagesse to talk to people about almost anything under the sun – sometimes making mistakes, like in the case of Greta Thunberg, the young woman that he dismisses as being too vocal about humanity getting suffocated, when she does not yet know what she is about, much if anything about the world…this is not just condescending, it is plain wrong – and he sometimes takes on the…’Russian Questions
Russian questions for Andrei Plesu would be the fundamental ones that regard the paramount mysteries and issues, such as the Meaning of Life – incidentally, Martin Seligman, the co-founder of positive psychology, has written in his Flourish http://realini.blogspot.com/2013/11/f... a formula of happiness, PERMA, in which the M stands for having Meaning,
And the rest for positive emotions, engagement, Relationships, and achievement – and we are invited in Anna Karenina to look at birth, death, religion…it is intriguing and inspiring to watch Konstantin Levin navigate between his skepticism and the faith shown by most people, including his wife Kitty
Kitty is first infatuated with the dashing Vronsky, and if we are to be maximizers – something that is explained in the quintessential The Paradox of Choice http://realini.blogspot.com/2015/07/t... by Barry Schwartz - then we could find fault with the girl, and say that perhaps it is not love she would eventually feel for Levin, since she had rejected him once…
One of the most intriguing, maybe difficult questions would be to understand what really happens to Anna Karenina and Vronsky, why does their love ‘die’, is it even possible – Thomas Mann http://realini.blogspot.com/2021/09/t... has a character in one of his short stories that is aghast at the way people keep saying ‘I love you so much, there are no words to express this’, and the personage protests, stating that ‘love., Friends’ are extant only in art, literature, because the meaning of these words is so vast and comprehensive, love is eternal, but when we test ‘that love which is beyond words’ we see that it is limited, fails the not so difficult tests, when we need the real support of some ‘friend’, he does not have the time, inclination, the friendship to be there…
http://realini.blogspot.com/2016/02/h... there is such a thing as Hedonic Adaptation, demonstrated by psychology tests, which show that we adapt to almost all situations (expect for very loud noises, do not move near an airport, thinking you will get used with the terrible noise, the loss of someone dear, unemployment, these are more difficult to adapt to) and what seems like eternal bliss becomes something we do not see anymore…there is The Honeymoon Effect: after about two years, partners in couples or marriages tend to look for novelty and may start an affair (not all, evidently) and then finally, The Coolidge Effect and that light anecdote, to end what is a chef d’oeuvre, with such a cataclysmic climax…the American president was visiting a farm, where a rooster was very active and the first lady asked how many times per day the animal jumped on hens and the answer was a very big number (I could not remember, but as with anything, you could google and get the approximation) which the first lady asked to be mentioned to the president, who in his turns asked if it is always the same hen, and the reply was that it is always a different one…in other words, had Vronsky been afflicted by this effect…yes, it is lowering the level of a magnum opus to a silly question, but hey, it is one of the many enigmas, issues of this gigantic masterpiece http://realini.blogspot.com/2022/02/u...
10 out of 10
With the war launched by Putin, to wipe out Ukraine from the map and add it to his would be empire, there have been calls to boycott not just oligarchs, Russian oil and gas (which alas, is still needed) but also some of the greatest luminaries, creators that the world has and happen to be Russian, like Leo Tolstoy, with reference to some of the less savory texts written by the count, or some of the other luminaries form the same outré country…he talks about ‘the Russification of Poland’ in this novel, though not arguing in favor of it, in the context of war, who has the right to launch it (the government) there is a wider argument over what happens when the people disagree with that action…
Indeed, at over eight hundred pages of magnum opus, we have the chance to read opinions, suggestions, points of view on almost anything under the sun, and when various characters talk, they touch on religion, politics, differences between the rich and the poor, with emphasis on love (obviously, this is about the dramatic entanglement between Anna Karenina and count Alexei Vronsky) this reader had been cautious in entering this phenomenal universe in part because of the aforementioned war (I was also curious to see what the effect would be, will I reject Tolstoy and hence others, because they are compatriots of the Putin Monster) and also I hate to know what happens.
And everybody is aware of the tragic destiny of the heroine (if not, well, spoiler alerts need to be included) who decides upon a gruesome ending…we have been most fortunate to have a magnificent, glorious professor of Literature, Anton Chevorchian, in high school, and among the many things, tales he told us, he referred to ‘naturalism’ and the manner in which artists of that trend would approach the death of Anna Karenina, insisting on what happens after the blow from the train, details that they would give, and that example has stayed with me for more than forty years, to this day actually
There was another argument against taking on this massive work (the more than eight hundred pages are indeed another cautionary signal) and that will refer to the personality, the character of Leo Tolstoy, exposed in the marvelous Intellectuals by brilliant Paul Johnson http://realini.blogspot.com/2014/06/i... who has looked at Henrik Ibsen, Ernest Hemingway, Jean-Jacques Rousseau (the latter has abandoned his children at the door of an orphanage, at a time when nine out of ten would die in that circumstance) and Tolstoy himself, concluding that these titanic writers would have a very dark, repugnant side, which for some could make sense…
Maybe the most fantastic thinker, and somehow also comedian, that we have is Andrei Plesu http://realini.blogspot.com/2022/05/d... one that has the sagesse to talk to people about almost anything under the sun – sometimes making mistakes, like in the case of Greta Thunberg, the young woman that he dismisses as being too vocal about humanity getting suffocated, when she does not yet know what she is about, much if anything about the world…this is not just condescending, it is plain wrong – and he sometimes takes on the…’Russian Questions
Russian questions for Andrei Plesu would be the fundamental ones that regard the paramount mysteries and issues, such as the Meaning of Life – incidentally, Martin Seligman, the co-founder of positive psychology, has written in his Flourish http://realini.blogspot.com/2013/11/f... a formula of happiness, PERMA, in which the M stands for having Meaning,
And the rest for positive emotions, engagement, Relationships, and achievement – and we are invited in Anna Karenina to look at birth, death, religion…it is intriguing and inspiring to watch Konstantin Levin navigate between his skepticism and the faith shown by most people, including his wife Kitty
Kitty is first infatuated with the dashing Vronsky, and if we are to be maximizers – something that is explained in the quintessential The Paradox of Choice http://realini.blogspot.com/2015/07/t... by Barry Schwartz - then we could find fault with the girl, and say that perhaps it is not love she would eventually feel for Levin, since she had rejected him once…
One of the most intriguing, maybe difficult questions would be to understand what really happens to Anna Karenina and Vronsky, why does their love ‘die’, is it even possible – Thomas Mann http://realini.blogspot.com/2021/09/t... has a character in one of his short stories that is aghast at the way people keep saying ‘I love you so much, there are no words to express this’, and the personage protests, stating that ‘love., Friends’ are extant only in art, literature, because the meaning of these words is so vast and comprehensive, love is eternal, but when we test ‘that love which is beyond words’ we see that it is limited, fails the not so difficult tests, when we need the real support of some ‘friend’, he does not have the time, inclination, the friendship to be there…
http://realini.blogspot.com/2016/02/h... there is such a thing as Hedonic Adaptation, demonstrated by psychology tests, which show that we adapt to almost all situations (expect for very loud noises, do not move near an airport, thinking you will get used with the terrible noise, the loss of someone dear, unemployment, these are more difficult to adapt to) and what seems like eternal bliss becomes something we do not see anymore…there is The Honeymoon Effect: after about two years, partners in couples or marriages tend to look for novelty and may start an affair (not all, evidently) and then finally, The Coolidge Effect and that light anecdote, to end what is a chef d’oeuvre, with such a cataclysmic climax…the American president was visiting a farm, where a rooster was very active and the first lady asked how many times per day the animal jumped on hens and the answer was a very big number (I could not remember, but as with anything, you could google and get the approximation) which the first lady asked to be mentioned to the president, who in his turns asked if it is always the same hen, and the reply was that it is always a different one…in other words, had Vronsky been afflicted by this effect…yes, it is lowering the level of a magnum opus to a silly question, but hey, it is one of the many enigmas, issues of this gigantic masterpiece http://realini.blogspot.com/2022/02/u...
May 26, 2025
The Greatest Novel Ever Written.
Tolstoy surpasses War and Peace with an examination of love, jealousy, passion and its dissipation with time, and one's purpose in life and how relationships sharpen that purpose. These ideas are explored in contrasting two couples, one made out of true love, and one formed out of passion and betrayal. Truly one of literature's great achievements. Bravo to Tolstoy for writing this landmark novel.
Tolstoy surpasses War and Peace with an examination of love, jealousy, passion and its dissipation with time, and one's purpose in life and how relationships sharpen that purpose. These ideas are explored in contrasting two couples, one made out of true love, and one formed out of passion and betrayal. Truly one of literature's great achievements. Bravo to Tolstoy for writing this landmark novel.
October 3, 2024
Anna Karenina is a philosophical masterpiece with a story embedded in it. There were moments of persevering through the deep thoughts of politics and agriculture and other moments when the pages turned more quickly. Anna is such a sad picture of the realities of our thoughts turned inward, but the contrasting spiritual journey of Levin is remarkable! I have much to learn about this work of art...
November 10, 2025
yes i finished it and yes it has greatly affected me
August 28, 2024
I went into this book blind. I’d heard of it, but with no clue why it is so renowned. I understand now. To be honest, it is not the most interesting story at its core. Rather, the writing and *how* the story is told is what matters. The acute humanness of the thoughts and actions of some characters could be very dull indeed, if not told properly, but Tolstoy weaves with his words and makes it worth the reading.
There is much sin and tragedy in this book (and males and females I very much wanted to wallop on the head, specifically Stepan——him especially. I’m pro-Stepan-walloping, all the way, I’d campaign on it) so if you want a light fluffy read, this is not it.
Personally I also enjoyed peeking into late 19th century Russia. It is not a time or a people I am much acquainted with, and reading this book gave me a taste of the climate of the time.
There is much sin and tragedy in this book (and males and females I very much wanted to wallop on the head, specifically Stepan——him especially. I’m pro-Stepan-walloping, all the way, I’d campaign on it) so if you want a light fluffy read, this is not it.
Personally I also enjoyed peeking into late 19th century Russia. It is not a time or a people I am much acquainted with, and reading this book gave me a taste of the climate of the time.
February 28, 2025
I want to say I never expected to love what I anticipated to be a romance novel so much.
That's the only the surface of what this is.
It contains worlds of thoughts. Seemingly endless emotions and intangibles within.
I read the Pevear/Volokhonsky translation switching every few chapters to then re-reading the same in the Constance Garnett translation. I appreciated noticing the differences between them.
I also have the Rosamund Bartlett translation if I ever find myself compelled to dive in again.
For fun, I also viewed a handful of film adaptations along the way.
Great book.
That's the only the surface of what this is.
It contains worlds of thoughts. Seemingly endless emotions and intangibles within.
I read the Pevear/Volokhonsky translation switching every few chapters to then re-reading the same in the Constance Garnett translation. I appreciated noticing the differences between them.
I also have the Rosamund Bartlett translation if I ever find myself compelled to dive in again.
For fun, I also viewed a handful of film adaptations along the way.
Great book.
February 16, 2025
Anna karenina doesn't feel like a fiction at all. It feels like you are in a 4d with these characters and it tells life . That's the best i can describe it as, from the smallest mundane moments to the most profound life questions is there all, LIFE. and i prefer constance garnett translation for my russian literature it's just literal and straight as it is.
June 6, 2025
absolutely beautiful, Constance Garnett is an incredible translator who captures the story and not just the literal definition of the words. other translations may promise accuracy, but she comes with a promise of caring about the story she is telling
April 13, 2025
Possibly the greatest novel of all time. If I could only recommend 5 books to read in your life, this would be one of them.
Read
August 17, 2025Levin over Anna everyday all day
December 2, 2025
Kind of embarrassed this took me over 2 months to read but I’ll still be pretentious about it for the rest of time
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews