Anna Karenina

A New Translation by Erato Press | A Novel in Eight Parts | Leo Tolstoy

De: Leo Tolstoy

Narrado por: Virtual Voice

The most famous opening line in Russian literature announces a novel about the costs of happiness. The most famous ending announces that happiness was never the subject.

All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

Anna Karenina is married to a man she respects but cannot love. She meets Vronsky at a train station. What follows is not a love story — it is an anatomy of what happens when a person chooses desire over duty in a world that will not forgive that choice. Tolstoy does not punish Anna because she is immoral. He punishes her because her society does. The distinction is everything.

But Anna Karenina is not one novel. It is two, braided together. The second novel is about Levin — a landowner, a philosopher of sorts, a man trying to understand how to live on his own farm while the world modernizes around him. Levin does not have Anna's tragedy. He has something quieter and, Tolstoy suggests, more true: the slow work of building a life that means something.

Tolstoy wrote Anna Karenina between 1873 and 1877, in the years before the religious crisis that would transform him into the ascetic moralist of his final decades. This is the last great novel he wrote as a man still in love with the world — with horses, with hunting, with desire, with the smell of hay. After this, he wanted to burn it all down. The novel survives as the record of everything he was about to renounce.

✦ Complete and unabridged text of all eight parts, in a new English translation by Erato Press under the editorial supervision of Henry Bugalho.

✦ Includes an original Note on Russian Names — a guide to the patronymic system and the principal characters, essential for readers encountering Russian fiction for the first time.

For readers who enjoy:

✦ Leo Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Ivan Turgenev, Anton Chekhov ✦ Historical literary fiction — 19th-century Russia at its most vivid and most suffocating ✦ Novels where the plot is the surface and the argument runs underneath ✦ War and Peace, and readers ready for the novel Tolstoy wrote when he still believed life was worth living

Tolstoy gave Anna everything she wanted. Then he showed what everything costs.