Count Leo Tolstoy was born on September 9, 1828, in Yasnaya
Polyana, Russia. Orphaned at nine, he was brought up by an elderly
aunt and educated by French tutors until he matriculated at Kazan
University in 1844. In 1847, he gave up his studies and, after
several aimless years, volunteered for military duty in the army,
serving as a junior officer in the Crimean War before retiring in
1857. In 1862, Tolstoy married Sophie Behrs, a marriage that was to
become, for him, bitterly unhappy. His diary, started in 1847, was
used for self-study and self-criticism; it served as the source
from which he drew much of the material that appeared not only in
his great novels War and Peace (1869) and Anna
Karenina (1877), but also in his shorter works. Seeking
religious justification for his life, Tolstoy evolved a new
Christianity based upon his own interpretation of the Gospels.
Yasnaya Polyana became a mecca for his many converts At the age of
eighty-two, while away from home, the writer suffered a break down
in his health in Astapovo, Riazan, and he died there on November
20, 1910.
Richard Pevear and Larissa
Volokhonsky have produced acclaimed translations
of Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Gogol, and Bulgakov. Their
translation of The Brothers Karamazov won the 1991
PEN/Book-of-the-Month Club Translation Prize. They are married and
live in Paris, France.
“I finally finished Anna Karenina recently, in a translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. I think I can say without controversy that it’s a great book.” —Sally Rooney, The New York Times Book Review
Pevear and Volokhonsky, winners of the 1991 PEN/Book-of-the-Month Club Translation Prize for their version of Fyodor Dostoyevsky's The Brothers Karamazov, have produced the first new translation of Leo Tolstoy's classic Anna Karenina in 40 years. The result should make the book accessible to a new generation of readers. In an informative introduction, Pevear gives the reader a history of the work Tolstoy called his first true novel and which took him some four years to write. Pevear explains how Tolstoy took real events, incorporated them into his novel, and went through several versions before this tale of the married Anna and her love for Count Vronsky emerged in its final form in 1876. It was during the writing of the book that Tolstoy went through a religious crisis in his life, which is reflected in this novel. The translation is easily readable and succeeds in bringing Tolstoy's masterpiece to life once again. For all libraries. Ron Ratliff, Kansas State Univ., Manhattan Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.
"I finally finished Anna Karenina recently, in a translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. I think I can say without controversy that it's a great book." -Sally Rooney, The New York Times Book Review
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