I didn't get her last name yet... I'll let you know when I hear it.
And OMG... If you haven't... then you ABSOLUTELY NEED TO BUY it for Christmas! Buy it for yourself and you won't regret it. I can help with choosing translation. I think that's the most important part, because a translation can make or break a book. I've done TOO much research into it the last few days... haha.
I recommend either the Magarshack translation (Signet Classics edition - black background with the approaching train)... or the newest Bartlett translation (Oxford World Classics edition) and finally - the newest (from 2014) Marian Schwartz one (The Margellos World Republic of Letters edition).... it is amazing (the negative is that it's slower and harder to read, the sentences don't flow as well, but that can also be a positive depending what a person wants from a book) - still I think it's the closest to Tolstoy of all of them. My husband read it to me in Russian and we compared translations together. The Schwartz translation is quite expensive thought in paper, even though the kindle or the eBook may be cheap. P.S. Just checked the kindle version is 0.00 for that one and trust me... it's sublime.
So if you want to read it and feel the melodrama and the language to flow easy and not even feel like a translation - Magarshack no doubt about it, but if you want something as close as possible to Tolstoy, but a bit harder to read - Bartlett or Schwartz (both are the newest translations and they have the advantage of being based on the fullest Tolstoy text, the earlier editions have some missing sentences or parts). The Bartlett translation has a very beautiful hardcover and it's very easy to find online.
This is just my opinion, but the most popular Pavear and Volokhonsky translation... is just not as good. I read the first 50 pages and it's just so much worse compared to the other ones. But whatever edition you decide, it's still going to be okay, I think. Let me know if you start reading it! I'm still waiting for my Signet edition to arrive, and it will be sometime before Christmas.
OLTL has gotten me a bit obsessed with Anna Karenina right now. 😄 This soap just makes people want to read books and that's amazing.
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Maxim ·
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