The Best Translation of Anna Karenina (and the Best Free One)

For Anna Karenina, the strongest modern choices are Rosamund Bartlett (2014) — graceful, alive to Tolstoy's humor — and Marian Schwartz (2014), who keeps his deliberate roughness; Pevear & Volokhonsky (2000) remains the famous fidelity-first version that re-launched the book for a generation. The free shelf offers Constance Garnett (1901) — the translation through which the English-speaking world first fell in love with the novel — with real virtues, one famous vice, and a century of writers from Hemingway onward formed by her cadences.

Here's how they differ, the truth about Garnett, and the quick way to choose.

The modern field

P&V made their name on this book (an Oprah selection in 2004): they track Tolstoy's Russian closely — his repetitions, his odd rhythms — on the theory that smoothing him is losing him. Critics of the approach find the result stiff in places; admirers call it honest. Bartlett, a Tolstoy biographer, splits the difference beautifully — accurate, warm, and funnier than any predecessor, which matters in a novel people forget is often comic. Schwartz takes the P&V thesis further than P&V: where Tolstoy clangs, she clangs on purpose. Between Bartlett and Schwartz you're choosing between Tolstoy's charm and his edge; both are the real author.

Garnett, fairly judged

Constance Garnett translated seventy Russian volumes and taught English literature to hear Russian at all — but at speed, and when she hit a phrase she couldn't parse she sometimes simply skipped it. Nabokov was savage about her; Joseph Brodsky joked that English readers couldn't tell Tolstoy from Dostoevsky because they'd only read Garnett. The fair verdict on her Anna Karenina: fast, elegant, occasionally softened, missing a phrase here and there — and still the version whose sentences generations of great writers absorbed. Later editors (the Kent-Berberova revision) patched her gaps. As a free first read it is far better than its detractors say; as a study text, choose a modern.

Choosing in one minute

First read, want maximum pleasure: Bartlett. Want Tolstoy's texture at full strength: Schwartz or P&V. Starting tonight, free: Garnett, with a clear conscience — the novel's power survives her completely, and at 18-plus hours a free first pass before committing to a purchase is simple prudence. The names problem — every character with three names and a nickname — is identical in every translation; solve it with a cast list or a companion, not a different translator.

One passage to test them

Use the opening of Part One, chapter 1 — after the famous first line, the Oblonsky household in chaos. Garnett makes it flow; P&V make it tick; Bartlett makes it funny. Ten minutes with each in a bookstore or sample chapter settles the question better than any review, because the differences are audible immediately and consistent for 800 pages.

Frequently asked questions