Review: Completely Satisfying
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 09 3, 2011
I won't go into the literary or artistic worth of Anna Karenina except for one thing.  Tolstoy's writing about the Russian countryside and even agricultural practice is so picturesque and atmospheric that you feel like you can smell the various crops.  Superb writing.This Carefully Crafted Classics version of Anna Karenina was excellent.  The Maude translation, yes, does show its age, and more than a bit.  But it has to be better than certain translations of other classic Russian works I've read over the past couple of years.  And I appreciated the embedded footnotes.  They provided good explanation of context and translation of the frequent use of French without wrecking the flow.  This version is a steal at the price and highly recommended.  I'm subtracting a star because of the dated translation.  Also because of the weird use of Western first name and Russian patronymic, which I find jarring but which other readers might not object to at all.How neat would it be to be able to toggle a phrase from English to Russian, just to see what the original was?  C'mon, developers; help us out here.