![]() I was only vexed when I hit the chapters involving farming or fashion. I knew the novel, I found, the way a young man in love knows the body of his lover. Well, Tolstoy learned new languages by reading the New Testament in those languages, and as Anna Karenina was my bible, why couldn’t I?īecause Tolstoy was a genius and I was not and am not.Īfter seven years of daily practice, thousands of dollars spent on tutors, and several trips to language programs in Russia, including at Tolstoy’s estate, I had enough Russian to read Anna Karenina with some ease and complete fascination. So on a sabbatical, 10 years ago, I set out to read it in Russian, having given myself a couple of months of lessons. If I wanted to know what Anna Karenina “really said,” I decided I’d have to learn Russian. ![]() ![]() ![]() It was great, but it was just another translation. THE HOOPLA over Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky’s translation of Anna Karenina in 2000 made me think I was going to have a doubly intense experience, more than I had had the first time or in the dozen or 15 times I had already read it in other translations. ![]()
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