Anna Karenina

"We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry."

-- W.B. Yeats

Thus begins the introduction to my very favorite translation of Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, the translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. The quote is, in my opinion, an apt one. Most people who have studied this particular work are of the opinion that Tolstoy wrote himself into it as Levin, a man who has every reason to be happy yet finds himself deeply, perhaps even suicidally, unhappy. This struggle is, of course, the mirror image of Anna herself, the woman who has many reasons to be unhappy yet is happy until she meets a man (not her husband) who has fallen for her.

This novel is a beautiful one, and if you have not taken the time to familiarize yourself with the Russian classics, this is a great beginning. Don't worry; as the back cover says, this translation is "neither musty, nor overly modernized, nor primly recast as a Victorian landscape" (Caryl Emerson).

So, basically, what I'm saying is: "Read it. Read it now."

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