Anna Karenina

Leo Tolstoy

Jul 2020 · Penguin Classics · Narrated by Miranda Pleasence

4.5

12 reviews

Audiobook

36 hr 59 min

Unabridged

Eligible

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About this audiobook

Brought to you by Penguin.

This Penguin Classic is performed by Miranda Pleasence, the stage and television actress best known for her roles in Notes on a Scandal, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall and The Affair of the Necklace. This definitive recording includes an introduction by Richard Pevear.

Tolstoy's epic novel of love, destiny and self-destruction.

Anna Karenina seems to have everything - beauty, wealth, popularity and an adored son. But she feels that her life is empty until the moment she encounters the impetuous officer Count Vronsky. Their subsequent affair scandalizes society and family alike and soon brings jealously and bitterness in its wake. Contrasting with this tale of love and self-destruction is the vividly observed story of Levin, a man striving to find contentment and a meaning to his life - and also a self-portrait of Tolstoy himself.

This acclaimed modern translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky won the PEN/ Book of the Month Club Translation Prize in 2001.

'The new and brilliantly witty translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky is a must' - Lisa Appignanesi, Independent, Books of the Year

'Pevear and Volokhonsky are at once scrupulous translators and vivid stylists of English, and their superb rendering allows us, as perhaps never before, to grasp the palpability of Tolstoy's "characters, acts, situations"' - James Wood, New Yorker

Translation copyright © Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky 2003 (P) Penguin Audio 2020

Ratings and reviews

4.5

12 reviews

Ashley Ho

October 1, 2024

Parts of the story are engaging but they are interspersed with long very dull passages that do nothing at all to advance the story or develop the characters. Less than half of the book is actually about Anna. It could just as well have been called Levin.

Paula Puddephatt - Author

December 19, 2021

An incredible novel, and am now looking forward to the War and Peace audiobook. Anna is scarily relatable, in many ways.

Anil Das

February 24, 2022

AAA BOSS NETWORK

About the author

Leo Tolstoy was born in 1828 in the Tula province. He studied at the University of Kazan, then led a life of pleasure until 1851 when he joined an artillery regiment in the Caucasus. He established his reputation as a writer with The Sebastopol Sketches (1855-6). After a period in St Petersburg and abroad, he married, had thirteen children, managed his vast estates in the Volga Steppes and wrote War and Peace (1869) and Anna Karenina (1877). A Confession (1879-82) marked a spiritual crisis in his life, and in 1901 he was excommuincated by the Russian Holy Synod. He died in 1910, in the course of a dramatic flight from home, at the railway station of Astapovo. Richard Pevear, along with his wife Larissa Volokhonsky, has translated works by Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Chekhov, Gogol, Bulgakov and Pasternak. They both were twice awarded the PEN/Book-of-the-Month Club Translation Prize (for Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov and Tolstoy's Anna Karenina). They are married and live in France.

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