Anna Karenina (2016)

At its simplest, Anna Karenina is a love story. It portrays a beautiful and intelligent woman whose passionate love for a handsome officer sweeps aside her marriage and the network of relationships and moral values that bind society around her. Anna and Vronsky’s affair unfolds alongside the developing romance of Kitty and Levin. In Levin, closely based on Tolstoy himself, the search for happiness takes on a deeper philosophical significance. One of the greatest novels ever written, Anna Karenina combines penetrating psychological insight with an encyclopedic depiction of Russian life in the 1870s. The novel moves from high society in St Petersburg to the threshing fields on Levin’s estate, with unforgettable scenes at a Moscow ballroom, skating rink, race course and railway station. It creates an intricate labyrinth of connections that is profoundly satisfying and deeply moving. Rosamund Bartlett’s translation conveys Tolstoy’s precision of meaning and emotional accuracy in a highly readable and stylistically faithful English version. Like her acclaimed biography of Tolstoy, it is vivid, nuanced and compelling.