Tolstoy began to write Anna Karenina between four and five yours after the completion and publication of War and Peace, and he began it, as he claimed, partly as a result of an accident. But there is some irony in the fact that Tolstoy’s later parables and polemical works are not much read today, whereas his two great novels – if for convenience we can agree to call them that – remain as popular as ever. ’ Later in his long life claimed that neither had any value, because all that mattered was God and the Truth, and the search to find them. Tolstoy himself always claimed that War and Peace was not a novel at all, ‘as the west understand the term’, but a form unique to himself, and only possible in Russia whereas Anna Karenina he described to a friend as ‘this novel, the first I have attempted.

They are very different from each other, although neither could have been written by anyone else.

Preface Devoted readers of Tolstoy, and there are a great many of them, would find it hard to say which of his two great novels is their particular favourite.

PG3366.A6 2001 891.73’3-dc21 00–043356 Printed in the United States of America Set in Sabon Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re–sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser. Russia-Social life and customs-1533– I917-Fiction. Translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky Recommended for discussion by the Great Books Foundation Winner of the PEN/BOOK-OF-THE-MONTH CLUB TRANSLATION PRIZE Published by the Penguin Group Published in Penguin Books (U.K.) 2001 Published in Penguin Books (U.S.A.) 2002 13Translation copyright © Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, 2000 All rights reserved The Library Of Congress has cataloged the American hardcover edition as follows: Tolstoy, Leo, graf, 1828– I910 Anna Karenina : a novel in eight parts / Leo Tolstoy translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky.

Anna karenina penguin classic