The Idiot (110 page)

 

Anna Karenina seems to have everything, but she feels that her life is empty until the moment she encounters the impetuous officer Count Vronsky. Their subsequent affair scandalizes society and family alike, and soon brings jealousy and bitterness in its wake. Contrasting with this tale of love and self-destruction is the vividly observed story of Levin, who strives to find contentment and a meaning to his life - and also a self-portrait of Tolstoy himself.

 

This new translation has been acclaimed as the definitive English version. The volume contains an introduction by Richard Pevear and a preface by John Bayley.

 

 

Translated by
RICHARD PEVEAR
and
LARISSA VOLOKHONSKY
With a preface by
JOHN BAYLEY

 

Three of Tolstoy’s most powerful and moving shorter works are brought together in this volume. ‘The Death of Ivan Ilyich’ is a masterly meditation on life and death, recounting the physical decline and spiritual awakening of a worldly, successful man who is faced with his own mortality. ‘Happy Ever After’, inspired by one of Tolstoy’s own romantic entanglements, tells the story of a seventeen-year-old girl who marries her guardian twice her age. And ‘The Cossacks‘, the tale of a disenchanted young nobleman who seeks fulfilment amid the wild beauty of the Caucasus, was hailed by Turgenev as the ‘finest and most perfect production of Russian literature’.

 

Rosemary Edmonds’s classic translation fully captures the subtle nuances of Tolstoy’s writing, and the volume includes an introduction discussing the stories’ influences and contemporary reactions towards them.

 

Translated with an introduction by
ROSEMARY EDMONDS

 

Napoleon’s invasion of Russia forms the backdrop for Tolstoy’s masterpiece. At its centre are Pierre Bezuhov, searching for meaning in his life; cynical Prince Andrei, ennobled by suffering in the war; and Natasha Rostov, whose impulsiveness threatens to destroy her happiness. As Tolstoy follows the changing fortunes of these characters, scenes of domestic life are juxtaposed with magnificent battle sequences, creating an epic and intimate view of humanity. Often considered the greatest novel in any language,
War and Peace
is also a philosophical meditation on the tension between free will and fate as the forces of history move inexorably forward.

 

Rosemary Edmonds’s distinguished translation is accompanied by an introduction and a list of the novel’s principal characters.

 

 

 

Translated with an introduction by
ROSEMARY EDMONDS

 

Tired of the glitter and glamour of St Petersburg society, aristocratic dandy Eugene Onegin retreats to the country estate that he has recently inherited. There he begins an unlikely friendship with the idealistic young poet Vladimir Lensky, who welcomes this urbane addition to their small social circle and introduces Onegin to his fiancée Olga’s family. But when her sister Tatyana becomes infatuated with Onegin, his cold rejection of her love brings about a tragedy that encompasses them all. Unfolded with dream-like inevitability and dazzling energy, Pushkin’s tragic poem is one of the great works of Russian literature.

 

Charles Johnston’s acclaimed translation has been revised for this edition, which contains a new introduction and notes by Michael Basker, as well as John Bayley’s introduction to the original Penguin Classics edition.

 

 

 

Translated by
CHARLES JOHNSTON

With an introduction and notes by
MICHAEL BASKER

 

George Eliot’s most ambitious novel is a masterly evocation of diverse lives and changing fortunes in a provincial community. Peopling its landscape are Dorothea Brooke, a young idealist whose search for intellectual fulfilment leads her into a disastrous marriage to the pedantic scholar Casaubon; the charming but tactless Dr Lydgate, whose pioneering medical methods, combined with an imprudent marriage to the spendthrift beauty Rosamond, threaten to undermine his career; and the religious hypocrite Bulstrode, hiding scandalous crimes from his past. As their stories entwine, George Eliot creates a richly nuanced and moving drama, hailed by Virginia Woolf as ‘one of the few English novels written for grown-up people’.

 

This edition uses the text of the second edition of 1874. In her introduction, Rosemary Ashton, biographer of George Eliot, discusses themes of change in
Middlemarch,
and examines the novel as an imaginative embodiment of Eliot’s humanist beliefs.

 

 

Edited with an introduction and notes by
ROSEMARY ASHTON

 

Wrongly accused of theft and exiled from a religious community many years before, the embittered weaver Silas Marner lives alone in Raveloe, living only for work and his precious hoard of money. But when his money is stolen and an orphaned child finds her way into his house, Silas is given the chance to transform his life. His fate, and that of the little girl he adopts, is entwined with Godfrey Cass, son of the village Squire, who, like Silas, is trapped by his past.
Silas Marner,
George Eliot’s favourite of her novels, combines humour, rich symbolism and pointed social criticism to create an unsentimental but affectionate portrait of rural life.

 

The text uses the Cabinet edition, revised by George Eliot in 1878. David Carroll’s introduction is accompanied by the original Penguin Classics introduction by Q. D. Leavis.

 

Edited with an introduction by
DAVID CARROLL