Audiobook · read by volunteers
Anna Karenina, Book 1
Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910)
Read by Kirsten Ferreri · 34 chapters · 4 h 25
About the book
Moscow and St Petersburg society is stirred when Anna Karenina, a married woman admired for her grace and intelligence, arrives in Moscow to help patch up her brother’s marriage. There she meets the dashing officer Count Vronsky, and a chance encounter begins to alter several lives at once. Alongside Anna’s story runs that of Levin, a thoughtful landowner who struggles with love, faith and the meaning of work. Tolstoy sets the sensuous passion of the one beside the awkward sincerity of the other and lets the reader judge a world full of rules, appearances and quiet cruelties. This recording covers the first book of the novel in Constance Garnett’s English translation: thirty-four chapters, read by Kirsten Ferreri in about four and a half hours. It makes a rich and readable way into one of the great novels of the nineteenth century.
Introduction
Leo Tolstoy, born in 1828 and dead in 1910, wrote Anna Karenina in the 1870s, and it is often counted among the finest novels ever written. It follows a married woman whose love affair with an officer collides with the rigid expectations of Russian high society, while a second plot traces the searching life of a country landowner. Tolstoy treats both with the same close attention to feeling, habit and moral choice.
This recording presents the first book of the novel, in thirty-four chapters, in the English translation by Constance Garnett, who lived from 1861 to 1946 and translated a large share of the Russian classics for English readers. Her version, published in the early twentieth century, introduced generations of readers to Tolstoy, although later translators have criticised its smoothing of the original.
The book is a work of historical fiction and romance in the broad sense, but it is also a study of marriage, duty, jealousy, family and belief. Its opening scenes establish the households, the friendships and the tensions on which the rest of the story depends, so they reward careful listening.
Kirsten Ferreri, a LibriVox volunteer, reads the whole of this part alone, and it lasts about four and a half hours. Today, it remains a good way to meet Tolstoy: the novel is long, but this first book can be enjoyed on its own as a vivid portrait of a society and the people trapped in it.
Public domain
Leo Tolstoy died in 1910: the work is in the public domain in Switzerland, more than 70 years after the author’s death.
The LibriVox volunteers dedicated this recording to the public domain.
Sources : LibriVox page · Files at the Internet Archive · Original text