This Second Norton Critical Edition of Leo Tolstoy’s epic novel is again based on the Louise and Aylmer Maude translation (originally published in 1918; revised with notes in 1939), which has never been
surpassed. This volume reprints the 1939 edition, which the editor has revised, making twenty-one textual changes and revising or adding forty-nine footnotes.
"Backgrounds and Sources" includes central passages from the letters of Tolstoy and his correspondents, S. A. Tolstoy’s diaries, and contemporary accounts translated by George Gibian exclusively for this Norton Critical Edition. Together these materials document Tolstoy’s writing process and chronicle Anna Karenina’s reception upon publication during the period 1875–77.
"Criticism" unites Russian and Western interpretations to present the best canonical scholarship on Anna Karenina written between 1877 and 1994. A wide range of perspectives is provided by Fyodor M. Dostoevsky, Nikolai N. Strakhov, Matthew Arnold, M. S. Gromeka, D. S. Merezhkovsky, Boris Eikhenbaum, Henry Gifford and Raymond Williams, George Steiner, Lydia Ginzburg, Eduard Babaev, Gary Saul Morson, Caryl Emerson, Donna Tussing Orwin, and George Gibian.
A Chronology of Tolstoy’s life and an updated Selected Bibliography are also included.
List of the Principal Characters
List of Russian Words
The Text of Anna Karenina
Backgrounds and Sources
- Publication History of Anna Karenina
- Extracts from Letters, Diaries, and Newspapers
- Fyodor M. Dostoevsky – [The Russian View of Human Guilt and Crime]
- Nikolai N. Strakhov – [Levin and Social Chaos]
- Matthew Arnold – [Anna Karenina as Life, Not Literature]
- M. S. Gromeka – [The Epigraph and the Meaning of the Novel]
- D. S. Merezhkovsky – [Tolstoy’s Physical Descriptions]
- Boris Eikhenbaum – [Anna Karenina and the Literary Tradition] – [The Coposition of Anna Karenina: Its Russian and Western Antecedents] – [The Puzzle of the Epigraph, N. Schopenhauer]
- Henry Gifford and Raymond Williams – [D. H. Lawrence and Tolstoy: A Critical Debate]
- Henry Gifford: Anna, Lawrence, and “The Law”
- Raymond Williams: Lawrence and Tolstoy
- Henry Gifford: Further Notes on Anna Karenina
- George Steiner – [The Beginning of Anna Karenina] – [The Ending of Anna Karenina]
- George Gibian – Two Kinds of Human Understanding and the Narrator’s Voice in Anna Karenina
- Lydia Ginzburg – Casual Conditionality
- Eduard Babev – The Tale of Three Portraits
- Gary Saul Moson – Anna Karenina’s Omens
- Caryl Emerson – [Is Tolstoy Monologic?]
- Donna Tussing Orwin – [Children and Peasants in Anna Karenina: From Nature to Culture] – [Moral Freedom: Schopenhauer and Levin]
Leo Tolstoy: A Chronology