Transliteration
A simplified version of the British Standard transliteration system has been chosen for ease and accuracy of pronunciation, with a final ‘-y’ used for proper nouns ending in й, ий and bIй, as in ‘Tolstoy’, and ‘ye’ replacing ‘e’ in place-names and proper names, so that ‘Pokrovskoe’ becomes ‘Pokrovskoye’ and ‘Arkadevna’ becomes ‘Arkadyevna’. Proper names with ‘ks’ have also been spelled with an ‘x’, thus ‘Alexandrovna’ has been preferred to the more accurate Aleksandrovna. In the case of ‘ë’, confusion often results since it is invariably printed as ‘e’. This has led to a long-standing debate about whether the name of Tolstoy’s hero Levin should be pronounced ‘Lyovin’, in accordance with the writer’s own family nickname of ‘Lyova’ and his habit of projecting his own thoughts and ideas into his central characters. In this translation ‘yo’ replaces ‘ë’ (so that ‘Fedorovna’, for example, becomes ‘Fyodorovna’, and ‘Matrena’ becomes ‘Matryona’), but Levin has been preferred to Lyovin. This is both in accordance with recent scholarly consensus,5 and because ‘ë’ in Russian phonology is generally only followed by a hard consonant—the ‘v’ is softened by ‘i’ in ‘Levin’, but not by ‘a’ in ‘Lyova’. Finally, the spelling of the novel’s English names and nicknames has been retained, so that ‘Kitty’ is preferred to an accurate transliterated Russian version (‘Kiti’ or ‘Kity’) and ‘Lydia’ preferred to ‘Lidiya’.
A few Russian words known internationally, including ‘zemstvo’ and ‘dacha’, are transliterated, rather than translated. Proper names are reproduced exactly as they are in the original. This translation largely preserves Tolstoy’s punctuation, but diverges from his practice of never capitalizing the names of biblical figures or institutions.
This translation has benefited immensely from painstaking comments made by Amy Mandelker, to whom thanks are gratefully expressed.
1 C. J. G. Turner, A Karenina Companion (Waterloo, Ont., 1993), 53–97.
2 Henry Gifford, ‘On Translating Tolstoy’, in Malcolm Jones (ed.), New Essays on Tolstoy (Cambridge, 1978), 22.
3 S. N. Shchukin, ‘Iz vospominanii ob A. P. Chekhove’, Russkaya mysl’, 10 (1911), 45, reprinted in N. I. Gitovich et al. (eds.), A. P. Chekhov v vospominaniyakh sovremennikov (Moscow, 1960), 463–4.
4 Yury Olesha, Povesti i rasskazy (Moscow, 1965), 492–3, cited in Natasha Sankovitch, Creating and Recovering Experience: Repetition in Tolstoy (Stanford, 1998), 20.
5 See Alexis Klimov, ‘Is it “Levin” or “Lëvin”?’, Tolstoy Studies Journal, 11 (1999), 108–11.
SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
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