Anna Karenina2014
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.