'Love...it means too much to me, far more than you can understand.'
Anna Karenina is a beautiful and intelligent woman, whose passionate love for a handsome officer sweeps aside all other ties - to her marriage and to the network of relationships and moral values that bind the society around her. Her love affair with Vronsky is played out alongside the developing romance between Kitty and Levin, and in the character of Levin, closely based on Tolstoy himself, the search for happiness takes on a deeper philosophical significance.
One of the greatest novels ever written, Anna Karenina combines penetrating psychological insight with an encyclopedic depiction of Russian life in the 1870s. From high society St Petersburg to the threshing fields on Levin's estate, the novel's intricate labyrinth of connections is deeply involving. Rosamund Bartlett's new translation conveys Tolstoy's precision of meaning and emotional accuracy in an English version that is vivid, nuanced, and compelling.
Rosamund Bartlett's translation of Tolstoy's 'Anna Karenina' is outstanding and made the novel a joy to read again after many years. It is especially good due to the contextual and explanatory notes she provides at puzzling points in the text. Bartlett has also written a comprehensive, enthralling biography of Tolstoy that links his life events, writing, and his inner turmoil to the full sweep of cultural, societal and political change that riveted Russia in the mid-to-late nineteenth century. It's this deep understanding of his thinking that makes her translation so alive and pertinent. I would recommend reading this novel in full after recent film and television versions that constrict the story to the bare bones of Anna's predicament, moving as this is. The novel is broad sweeping and addresses so many other subjects and characters, a true epic that casts light on a feudal society on the cusp of modernism.
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