The whole Anna Karenina

Translators sometimes labour to improve their originals. Proust is so long-winded his sentences are better snapped in two; Kafka can't have meant all those clumsy "yets" and "quites" which it is therefore a kindness to tidy away.

Tolstoy has come in for his share of smartening up, too. He had, it's true, a visionary carelessness about verbal detail and trusted others with the task of seeing his work through the press, so that, in the case of Anna Karenin, some 900 errors accumulated and were reperpetrated for a century until the Moscow edition of the collected works (90 volumes) in 1970.

None the less, we have Nabokov's word that Tolstoy is "the greatest artist in Russian prose"; part of that artistry consists, as Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky write in a note to their excellent new translation of his masterpiece, in his readiness to repeat himself. Anna Karenin, for example, is drawn over and again to note that its people have done something "involuntarily". When Vronsky called on Anna after she had confessed their affair to her husband, he "smiled involuntarily" in his carriage, involuntarily began to share her anxiety, is caught "involuntarily leaning his whole body towards her" and, in consecutive sentences, "involuntarily yielded" to his impression of her husband and "involuntarily pictured" the challenge to a duel he expected to receive. The 1918 English version silently deletes three of these adverbs; 60 years later, Rosemary Edmonds replaced two of them with "could not help" and substituted "unconsciously" for a third.

But the novel is deeply occupied with what its narrator officially scorns as "a fashionable question" of its day: "Is there a borderline between psychological and physiological phenomena in human activity and where does it lie?" So deeply occupied that Tolstoy seems to have written it from just that borderland between the psychological and the physiological, and himself gravitated involuntarily to such words as "involuntarily". Pevear and Volokhonsky do not flinch from these intent reflexes in his prose and so incomparably convey the work in the vivid actuality of its physique, its accumulated mass of brimming or blinking eyes, irrepressible smiles, finger-cracking, and twitches of all kinds from the clenching of proud, adult jaws to a child's first kick in the womb. They behave towards the novel as Dolly defines love towards a person: "When you love someone, you love the whole person, as they are, and not as you'd like them to be". They are particularly deft at those moments of verbal automatism when a character gets stuck on a word, which then insists on itself as if it had a mind of its own, as when Anna poignantly tries to hold her adulterous head high: "I'm proud of my position, because ... proud of ... proud ..." She did not finish saying what she was proud of. Or when Karenin, speaking of himself in the third person, complains to her that she is "indifferent to the destruction of his whole life, to the suffering he has exple... expre... experimenced". This piercingly sad stutter came out as "thuf... thuf ... thuffered" or "suf... suf... suffled" in earlier renderings, versions which made it more understandable (but not less shocking) that Anna "nearly laughed" at his words.

Peaver and Volokhonsky have found the exact edge between the ludicrous and the woe-begone on which Karenin's injured dignity squirms. This depiction of Karenin, respected mandarin and "some-what comic" cuckold, is one of the novel's great strengths and makes of Anna Karenin a huge preface to Joyce's patient composition of Ulysses so that, when Bloom eventually manages to smile at his wife's adultery, a smile, not a smirk, crosses the reader's face, too (Alexei Alexandrovich Karenin is also a distant ancestor of George Smiley).

All happy families will receive a copy of this new translation this Christmas; each unhappy family will want one.