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574 pages

English

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Leo Tolstoy's most personal novel, Anna Karenina scrutinizes fundamental ethical and theological questions through the tragic story of its eponymous heroine. Anna is desperately pursuing a good, "moral" life, standing for honesty and sincerity. Passion drives her to adultery, and this flies in the face of the corrupt Russian bourgeoisie. Meanwhile, the aristocrat Konstantin Levin is struggling to reconcile reason with passion, espousing a Christian anarchism that Tolstoy himself believed in.Acclaimed by critics and readers alike, Anna Karenina presents a poignant blend of realism and lyricism that makes it one of the most perfect, enduring novels of all time.

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Publié par	Alma Books
Date de parution	01 janvier 2018
Nombre de lectures	1
EAN13	9780714545974
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	1 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0150€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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Anna Karenina
Leo Tolstoy

Translated by Kyrill Zinovieff and Jenny Hughes

ALMA CLASSICS

Alma Classics an imprint of
alma books ltd 3 Castle Yard Richmond Surrey TW10 6TF United Kingdom www.almaclassics.com
Anna Karenina first published in Russian in 1878 This translation first published by Alma Books Ltd (previously Oneworld Classics) in 2008 This new edition first published by Alma Books Ltd in 2014. Repr. 2015
Translation, Preface, Translators’ Note and Notes © Kyril Zinovieff and Jenny Hughes, 2008 Extra Material © Alma Classics Ltd
Cover design: nathanburtondesign.com
Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR 0 4 YY
isbn : 978-1-84749-368-2
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not be resold, lent, hired out or otherwise circulated without the express prior consent of the publisher.

Contents
Preface
Translators’ Note
Acknowledgements
Anna Karenina
Part One
Part Two
Part Three
Part Four
Part Five
Part Six
Part Seven
Part Eight
Note on the Text
Notes
Extra Material
Leo Tolstoy’s Life
Leo Tolstoy’s Works
Select Bibliography

Preface
L eo Tolstoy once remarked that he was not a writer but a landowner (or, maybe, a farmer) who wrote. He is not always easy to interpret. He probably meant that, when his farming duties permitted, he wrote down his opinions on more or less anything which he felt could be useful to mankind.
By the end of Anna Karenina , however, one is left with the feeling not so much that one has just read something that Tolstoy has written as that the author has just concluded a long, discursive, conversation with the reader. The author of Anna Karenina seems to talk rather than write. Of course, he has a story to tell. But he also wants to have a discussion: about spiritualism, about raspberry jam and amateur painters and whether children should be taught French and women should go to university, about Wagner and wet nurses and the Balkan War and the absurdities of medical science. Above all, he wants to exchange views about the so-called Great Reforms of Alexander II which were being introduced during the 1860s and 1870s and which effectively realized the main demands of the Decembrists whom Alexander’s father, Nicolas I, had crushed and punished nearly fifty years before.
The odd thing about Tolstoy’s views on the Great Reforms, which were perhaps Russia’s first and last hope of peacefully becoming a modern state and of avoiding a violent revolution, is that they were almost entirely reactionary. Emancipate the serfs (1861)? Russian agriculture would never prosper again. Expand secondary education? People would be worrying their heads about the partition of Poland in the eighteenth century when they ought to be getting in the hay. Make the judiciary independent, with juries and non-stipendiary magistrates (1864)? A waste of everyone’s time. Abolish corporal punishment (1874)? Soldiers would be drunk all the time instead of only half of it. Transfer a measure of autocratic power from the centre to elected local councils (1864 and 1870)? What a farce!
Unfortunately, the Reforms were followed by successive attempts on the Emperor’s life by revolutionary societies, causing the government to pause and introduce restrictive measures which in turn increased political discontent. The final attempt at assassination (1881) killed Alexander II, who died with the draft of his last reform (it would have taken a first step towards introducing a limited constitution) in his pocket and all progress came to an end in the repressive regime of Alexander III. But why was Tolstoy so scathing, so dismissive about it all? And why did he choose to devote so many pages of Anna Karenina to mocking these attempts to improve the governance of Russia?
Because he no longer believed, if he ever had, in the efficacy of reform. Evolutionary changes in laws or institutions were distractions from the true path of improvement which lay only through the human soul; which was personal, spiritual and revelatory. His consuming preoccupation, at this time and until he died, was to discover a meaning for life which was consistent with the inescapable fact that all lives end in death. (This is probably the explanation of the fact that the only chapter in Anna Karenina to be given a heading, Chapter 20, Part V, is given the heading of Death .) Before he had completed Anna Karenina , in 1877, Tolstoy the farmer, the writer and the conversationalist was in the process of discovering Tolstoy the prophet.
Less than two years later, in 1879, he had published his painful solution to his problem in A Confession :
“Man’s purpose in life is to save his soul; in order to save his soul he must live according to God. In order to live according to God one must renounce all the comforts of life; work, be humble, suffer and be merciful.”
So it would be necessary to walk away from the familiar, comfortable, complacent life of “the minority of those of us who are parasites” and renounce “the life of our class, having recognized that it is not life but only a semblance of life, and that the conditions of luxury in which we live deprive us of the possibility of understanding life.”
The first flash of this revelation appears in Chapter 11, Part VIII of Anna Karenina . Levin is talking to a peasant about why one peasant can make a farm profitable while another cannot, and the answer comes:
“‘Fokanych is a just old man… he lives for his soul’s sake, he does, bears God in mind, too’… ‘Yes, yes, I see what you mean, goodbye,’ said Levin, breathless with excitement. Turning away, he took his stick and walked off quickly in the direction of his house. At the peasant’s words that Fokanych lived for his soul’s sake, righteously, the way God willed, vague but significant thoughts seemed to rush out in a crowd from where they had been confined and, making for a single goal, whirled round in his head, blinding him with their light.”
It is to tell us about this critical moment in his own life, as well perhaps as to tie up a few loose ends, that Tolstoy adds Part VIII to his love story, after his heroine has suffered the terrible penalty for her transgression and that story itself is over. The period during which Tolstoy was writing Anna Karenina overlaps (by about two years) what he describes as “the religious struggles” which brought him to write A Confession. So there is a sense in which A Confession should be regarded as Part IX of Anna Karenina .
Meanwhile, before he leaves it for ever, there is pleasure still to be had from describing the luxurious life of the parasitic minority, not in a literary style but in the colloquial vocabulary and idiomatic phrases of upper class Russians of his time. (In War and Peace , written five years before, much of the conversation is conducted in French. In Anna Karenina Tolstoy puts most of it directly into Russian, though occasionally it reads like a translation from the French.) There is pleasure, too, in talking about everything these people would talk about; pleasure in describing, with consummate brilliance, their mannerisms, their affectations, their hypocrisies and their genuine emotions; pleasure in using the names of his friends and relations: so Oblonsky is a slightly amended form of Obolensky, Shcherbatsky of Shcherbatov, Levin of his own Christian name, Lev. (In the third draft, later changed, Levin even acquires Tolstoy’s patronymic Nikolayevich.)
Indeed, Tolstoy himself appears in Anna Karenina more distinctly and in thinner disguise than anywhere else in his fictional writing. And Yasnaya Polyana appears too, room by room and copse by copse, in the descriptions of Levin’s estate at Pokrovskoe. Levin goes haymaking; Levin’s brother Nikolai dies of tuberculosis; Levin proposes to the girl he wants to marry with chalk marks on the green baize card-table; Levin gives her his bachelor diaries to read, loses his dress shirt and is late for his own wedding; Levin hides the rope in case he should hang himself – all these things happen to Levin but not before they had happened to Tolstoy. Even Levin’s attempts to introduce his peasants to improved agricultural methods were prefigured by Tolstoy in A Landowner’s Morning (1856).
And yet, familiar though all this territory is and absorbing the conversation, Tolstoy took from early 1873 until April 1877 to write Anna Karenina . He starts off gaily enough in March 1873: “I have today finished in rough a very lively, ardent, finished novel which will be ready… in two weeks” (letter not sent). But by March 1874 “I don’t like it at all at present…it’s terribly repulsive and disgusting”; and in the summer of 1875 he is talking about “boring, commonplace Anna Karenina …if only someone would finish it for me.” Slowly, one feels, as Anna and Vronsky’s love affair darkens and as society turns its back on the doomed lovers, Tolstoy is trying to distance himself from the comfortable world of his class and has gone in search of salvation.
None of this detracts from the power and perception of the love story that he originally set out to tell. He had finished War and Peace in 1869. By 1870, he is trying to write about Peter the Great but is so repelled by him that he cannot go on. So he abandons Peter in favour of a primer for elementary school children, full of folk lore and fairy stories, which was published in 1872 to a disappointing response.
But already images in the story of Anna Karenina are flickering across his fie