Anna Karenina (Oxford World's Classics Hardback Collection)

Yes this book is that good. A beautiful story full of characters we can see in ourselves and others. Thoughts on society and God that are very relevant for today's world. I highly recommend Oxford World's Classics for translation and notes.I am a year sober for starting a journey of understanding with this book.

I enjoyed this epic novel. It took me 2 months to read on my Kindle. I agree with other reviewers that Tolstoy perhaps should have given the book a different title (Ex. "Konstantine Levin," "Anna and Levin," or even "What Love Really Is") as the novel parallels the love stories of both Anna/Vronsky and Levin/Kitty. Tolstoy, however, knew what he was doing, as all master writers do. Anna Karenina is perhaps the most famous novel of all time.This novel is not a "love story" in the traditional sense because Tolstoy actually compares both couples. What constitutes true love between a man and a woman? Is passionate love really that big a deal at the end of the day? What keeps a couple together?Favorite characters: Levin, Kitty, Karenin, and Dolly. Why? Tolstoy fleshed out the humanity and inner journey of each of these characters well. The souls of these people grew as the novel progressed, and I marveled at their journeys toward forgiveness, growth, and self-acceptance. Their lives were never going to be perfect, but they did the best they could do - without intentionally hurting others. Through terrible trials, they became adults.I found Levin's (really Tolstoy's) search for God refreshing because it mirrors my own lifelong search for truth and meaning. Tolstoy and I were "soul mates! I also enjoyed the epic scenes of life in 1870s aristocratic Russia: the hunts, the Italy scenes, and German spa scenes, the election, and the upcoming war. Tolstoy explored the issues of the peasants and what it meant to be a landowner with honesty.What an epic read. My hat's off to you, Count Tolstoy!

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.

Rosamund Bartlett's 2014 translation is so good that I re-read it less than a year after reading it the first time! Four years ago I read the old Maude translation and also enjoyed that immensely. I suspect that it would take a really bad translator to make this novel anything other than compulsively readable. This edition has the advantage of a modern, but never anachronistic, translation and a terrific introduction as well as a very helpful set of end notes.After finishing Bartlett's translation the first time, I turned my attention to Marian Schwartz's new translation. While that has some interesting differences (including a more successful - in my opinion - opening chapter), on balance I really much preferred Bartlett's work. Schwartz too frequently falls into what I think of the "Pevear & Volokhonsky trap": in an effort to remain literally faithful to Tolstoy many of the passages read as if translated by Babelfish. However, I would always advise someone to sample different translations before purchasing. For me, Bartlett's is now my "go to" AK translation (now, if only she'd translate WAR AND PEACE!).

I probably should not have read this after reading War and Peace as it was incredibly underwhelming. However, once again Tolstoy takes on profound issues that are still quite relevant today using the work of fiction, thus sending a powerful message to the reader. This is the allure of Tolstoy. I wasn't expecting long theses in this novel, but the conversations about finding religion and god, serfdom, and love itself made me consider workers around the world today whom are exploited for cheap labor, how religion itself isn't entirely a terrible thing (especially when it's not being used as a weapon against others), and if it's even worth to love someone at this point in my life. As with every Tolstoy work, it's an emotional rollercoaster. Sure, Anna Karenina is a love story, but it's not the sappy kind of trash with Fabio on the front cover. It's about love in the physical sense. It's about love in the corporeal sense. Love of oneself. Love of an omniscient being. Love of work. Love of being alive. Love of living to life fullest extent.As for the actual edition of the book: The ebook could have better navigation or even footnotes for better reading. I for one don't enjoy having to flip through pages all the time to understand a French sentence or learning about something from Imperialist Russia. The annotations do their job though, I'm tickled by the fact that I've learned more through annotations in Tolstoy than I ever did through my education in the United States public school system.

The charming and very beautiful Anna Karenina leaves her husband and young son in Petersburg and arrives in Moscow on a mercy mission to help her brother, Stepan Oblonsky, and his wife Dolly, who are encountering difficulties in their marriage. When Anna arrives in Moscow, she meets Count Vronsky, a handsome young officer, who has been paying court to Dolly's sister, the very pretty and naive Kitty. However, when Vronksy sets eyes on Anna, he forgets Kitty - who has just turned down an offer of marriage from her devoted admirer, Konstantin Levin, in the hopes of an offer from Vronsky - and transfers his attentions to the lovely older woman. In response, Anna soon finds herself becoming very attracted to Count Vronsky and consequently she leaves Moscow having helped her brother with his marriage difficulties, but goes away with problems in store for her own marriage. As Anna and Vronsky spend more time with one another, the pair of them fall in love and begin a passionate and, for Anna, an all-consuming love affair, but when Anna's husband learns of the seriousness of their relationship, he ensures that Anna will be made to pay for her betrayal. There is a huge amount more to this novel than the story of a love affair and its repercussions, where Leo Tolstoy looks at Russian society and social class; at politics and religion; at morality and relationships, including Russia's relationship to the land; at gender and inequality; at people's search for a meaningful life and the quest for personal happiness, and a whole lot more.It says on the sleeve of my edition that 'Anna Karenina' is one of the greatest novels ever written and combines penetrating psychological insight with an encyclopaedic depiction of Russian life in the 1870s, and I would certainly agree with that comment. Leo Tolstoy writes with such attention to detail, intricately describing not just his characters' outward appearances, the clothes they wear, the houses they live in and the places they frequent, but he also delves into their inner thoughts and motivations and he describes everything with such detail that even reading about workers scything the land on Levin's estate becomes quite fascinating. Rosamund Barlett's new translation of this classic novel is a pleasure to read, the writing feels fluent, fresh and immediate; she comments in her introduction that she has sought to preserve the idiosyncrasies of Tolstoy's inimitable style and that although he was occasionally a clumsy and ungrammatical writer, there is a majesty and elegance to his prose that needs to be emulated in translation wherever possible. Her aim, Ms Bartlett states is to "produce a translation that is idiomatic as well as faithful to the original, and one which ideally reads as if it was written in one's own language." I would say that she has been successful in her aim and although I have to admit that I haven't read all of the previous translations of this novel, I have no hesitation in recommending this one.5 Stars.

Brilliant! This is a beautiful edition, an absolute joy to hold and to read. This fresh translation is very readable and comes with an excellent guide to those confusing Russian names. About the book itself, the most surprising thing is that it feels more like watching a modern drama than reading a fusty old novel. Anna and Vronsky are almost instantly recognizable as Scarlett O’Hara and Rhett Butler. Jilly Cooper’s Rupert Campbell Black also has a strong whiff of Vronsky’s cologne about him and Winston Graham’s Poldark has similarly had a splash of it. Richard Curtis, I’m convinced, has borrowed quite a few scenes from Tolstoy, in particular that airport montage from Love Actually. Tolstoy has been credited with inventing the concept of montage scenes.The book was originally published serially in a magazine and has magnificent cliff-hangers that make Dan Brown look like a little girl teetering in her Mummy’s stilettos.It is big, there is no escaping that, but every scene has value and the whole is a magnificent thing.Make time for Anna Karenina. You won’t regret it.

Reading this wonderful novel for the very first time well into mid-life, I dipped into 4 different translations. I settled on Bartlett's as my favourite (though I continued to refer to the other 3 at interesting moments, wondering how the others might have handled the same thing). Fabulous.

If I could give this new translation 6 stars I would. I bought the kindle version and found all the notes easy to access and Rosamund Bartlett gives brilliant explanations of the many Russian and French phrases that Tolstoy uses. Tolstoys own personality and interests shine through as she understands him so well. He was a very complex man himself and he uses his own experiences to explain the way in which people change their minds, say one thing when they mean another, act against their own interests etc etc. I can't believe this translation could be better.

bought for xmas present. very well made