Which translation of Anna Karenina should you read?

The version that made Anna Karenina an English novel. Garnett is warm, smooth, and quick, and for most of the twentieth century she was simply how English readers met Tolstoy. She tidies some of his deliberate repetition into graceful Victorian prose and occasionally nods, which is the standard knock on her, but the storytelling never flags and the great scenes land with full force. Being public domain, she is also free and everywhere, the text behind countless cheap paperbacks and e-books. Later hands (Kent and Berberova) lightly revised her. Choose Garnett if you want a dependable, readable Anna at no cost and do not mind that a little of Tolstoy’s strangeness has been ironed flat.

The standard English Anna Karenina for decades; the basis of the widely used Kent–Berberova revision.

The version everyone argued about, and the one Oprah sent up the bestseller lists. Volokhonsky drafts literally, Pevear shapes, and the aim is to keep exactly what smoother translators remove: Tolstoy’s insistent repetitions, the untranslated French of the salons, the un-English rhythms. Admirers say it is the closest thing to reading Tolstoy in Russian; detractors find the results stiff and self-conscious in English. The notes are good and the French is left on the page with translations. If you care about texture and want to feel the seams of the original, this is the one to own and quarrel with; if you just want the story to flow, look at Bartlett or Garnett.

The 2004 Penguin edition became a huge seller after Oprah’s Book Club; admired and disputed in equal measure.

The modern reader’s best all-rounder. Rosamund Bartlett, a Tolstoy biographer, writes clear, graceful contemporary English that stays faithful to the sense without the deliberate awkwardness of Pevear and Volokhonsky, and the Oxford World’s Classics apparatus is excellent. She threads the needle most first-time readers want: accurate and well annotated, but genuinely pleasurable to read at length. Purists who prize Tolstoy’s repetitions may find her a touch too smooth, and it is in copyright, so not free. But if you want one modern Anna Karenina to read cover to cover and trust, this is the one to reach for first.

The Oxford World’s Classics edition (2014); widely praised on release for balancing fidelity and readability.

The translator’s translation. Marian Schwartz set out to do in English what even Pevear and Volokhonsky soften: keep Tolstoy’s famous word-repetitions, his uneven sentences, and his refusal to sound polished, on the argument that the roughness is the style, not a flaw to fix. The result is bracing and deliberately un-smooth, closer to the grain of the Russian than almost anything else in print, with a strong scholarly introduction in the Yale edition. It asks more of the reader than Bartlett or Garnett and is not the one to hand a nervous beginner. But if you want to feel how strange Tolstoy actually is on the page, Schwartz is the boldest modern choice.

The Yale University Press edition (2014); noted by critics for consciously preserving Tolstoy’s repetition and rhythm.