New Anna Karenina Translation: My Grandfather's Tolstoy Connection

They are an enchanting pair: Nicolas tall and stately, quiet and very slow to speak; Maya small and birdlike, quick to laugh. They met, she tells me, “at two in the morning in a churchyard on the island of Tinos”. Nicolas smiles. “Very romantic. She had a boyfriend. I don’t know where I was with my girlfriend at the time. Anyway, she wasn’t there.” That was 1963. By now, their partnership, in life and translation, has become a well-oiled machine. Nicolas, who grew up in a Russian-speaking household and studied Russian at Oxford, will translate a paragraph or a page. He gives it to Maya, who runs her literary professor’s eye over it — and her red pen. “Then we look at what I’ve done and we argue” — she corrects herself — “discuss.” Their translation is published by the Folio Society in an enormous tome (you gain muscle just carrying it around) with gold-sprayed edges and painterly illustrations. Only 500 copies will be printed, each selling for £395. The cover, which shows four interlocking rings, reflects the interlocking lives of the four main characters. The St Petersburg princess Anna Karenina risks her reputation — and her life — for her love affair with a handsome officer, Alexei Vronsky. Meanwhile, Moscow’s most eligible young lady, Kitty Shcherbatsky, is pursued by the deep-thinking country bumpkin Konstantin Levin, but must first get over her obsession with Vronsky. The book is a pleasure to read as well as to look at: the Slaters’ prose is smooth, free-flowing and modern. And funny too. When Levin can’t understand his friend’s infidelity, he says: “It’s just as incomprehensible as if, after all we’ve eaten here, I was to walk past a baker’s stall and steal a roll.” Stiva Oblonsky replies, eyes twinkling: “Why not? Some rolls smell so delicious, you can’t resist.” Tolstoy’s infamously long and complex sentences have been chopped up and separated, his repetitions removed and the characters’ many confusing nicknames simplified. • Review: The 100 Best Novels in Translation by Boyd Tonkin — expands your literary horizons In the opening paragraph that famous first line remains the same: “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” But the repetition of the word “home” in the sentences that follow has been cut. “That is something that I’m aware we have removed from Tolstoy, which may be a mistake,” Maya admits. “But he’s a didactic man, Tolstoy.” It’s not just the cuts that Tolstoy traditionalists might quiver at, but the language itself, which is surprisingly up to date. At one point Anna, arriving home to her husband, asks him, “What’s up?” “We wanted it to reproduce, really, what it would feel like being a Russian reading it. So you’re not reading it as though it was a foreign language,” Maya says. “Nineteenth-century Russian isn’t so much different from modern Russian [compared with how different] 19th-century English is from modern English. And so to translate it like a Victorian novel, for us, was a mistake.” • Read more book reviews and interviews — and see what’s top of the Sunday Times Bestsellers List Nicolas agrees. “I translate the way I talk, the way I think. And I’m not a 2026 person, you know, I belong to the Seventies, Eighties, Nineties. And so that’s the sort of language that’s coming across.” To say that Nicolas is not a 2026 person is to understate the point. I have rarely met someone who feels so tangibly in touch with the past. He was born in Oxford in 1938 and grew up with his mother, Lydia Pasternak Slater, the sister of Boris Pasternak. His parents divorced when he was young, but also in the house was Lydia and Boris’s father, the Russian impressionist painter Leonid Pasternak (1862-1945). By then Leonid was a famous artist — he’d won a medal at the World’s Fair for his illustrations of Tolstoy’s War and Peace and Resurrection — but to Nicolas he was just “the kindest person in the world”. I ask if they have kept any of Leonid’s pictures. “Yes, many,” Nicolas says. “Would you like to see them?” On the staircase he shows me a small portrait, in profile, of Tolstoy. Tolstoy and Leonid met when the latter was commissioned to draw some illustrations for a new edition of War and Peace. Having asked the writer about some historical detail, they became fast friends and Leonid spent many months at Tolstoy’s estate, Yasnaya Polyana. “They were constantly telling each other funny stories and laughing together. And really, my grandfather explicitly said he had a marvellous sense of humour,” Nicolas says. That’s an attribute he particularly noticed in the process of translating Anna Karenina. “There’s so much of it that’s ironic, sarcastic, satirical or …” Maya interrupts: “Slapstick. Massive slapstick.” But Leonid’s friendship with Tolstoy also gave him an insight into the less funny side of the author: that is, his treatment of his wife, Sophia. The couple fought constantly. Sophia had 16 pregnancies, but only eight of their children survived to adulthood. She was also forced to adhere to Tolstoy’s increasingly erratic principles and ideas. On a visit to Yasnaya Polyana, Maya remembers seeing the “hand-knitted bed covers” all made by Sophia. “She was made to sew her husband’s peasant smocks and everything. She had a dreadful life, I think, actually.” In 1910, aged 82, Tolstoy left his wife with no warning. He died just ten days later. • Puns, poetry and pence per word — the secrets of literary translators Sophia asked Leonid to come to her husband’s deathbed and paint him. He brought along Boris. It was an unpleasant experience for them both. The room was filled with Tolstoy’s disciples, who were, Nicolas says, “incredibly pushy and taking things over … Tolstoy’s widow, who knew Boris well by that time, burst into tears in front of him and said, ‘I was the important one for him, not these horrible disciples of his.’” And it is Boris (1890-1960), not Leonid, whose presence is most strongly felt in the Slaters’ home. The sitting room is full of Leonid’s sumptuous paintings. There are some of Nicolas’s mother and father and a few landscapes, but your eye is naturally drawn to one at the heart of the room: a portrait of a man staring into the distance, with a gorgeous sunset behind him. The man is Boris Pasternak. Nicolas’s childhood and young adulthood were blighted by the suffering of his uncle. Doctor Zhivago included criticisms of the corruption of the Soviet state and of Stalin’s Great Purge, and Boris was punished for it. His family members, including Lydia, were banned from entering the Soviet Union, and for long stretches of time even from writing to Boris. “During Stalin’s terror and then the war, there was almost no communication,” Nicolas says. “Sometimes, a diplomat would travel between Moscow and England and they brought letters for us. But there were three or four-year intervals in which there would be only one letter.” • Fifty-Two Stories by Anton Chekhov, translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky review Nicolas never met his uncle in person. He was meant to visit him in 1959, on a year out from Oxford, where he was reading Russian, but it was not to be. “I turned up at the docks at Tilbury to board the ship that was to take us to Leningrad. And the visas were handed out and there wasn’t one for me. So I took my cabin trunk and went back to Oxford. That was a big disappointment and a big surprise.” The Soviet authorities, he reckons, saw the name “Pasternak” and scored it out. When Boris was offered the Nobel prize for literature in 1958, he was threatened with exile if he accepted it. He worried over the decision for a long time — and wrote to Lydia asking for advice — but ultimately felt he couldn’t bear to leave the country of his birth. Two years later he died of lung cancer. In an example of particularly cruel bureaucracy, as soon as the funeral was over Lydia was allowed to enter the country again. Nicolas didn’t enter Russia until the mid-Sixties. Under Putin’s regime, they are effectively barred again, as the Foreign Office advice not to visit Russia makes travelling there very difficult. For now the Russian language is the closest Nicolas can get to his ancestral home. I ask him whether he had a sense of Tolstoy over his shoulder, judging his work. “I felt the opposite,” he says. “I felt me looking over my shoulder at Tolstoy. Not ‘Is he going to think this is OK?’ but ‘Do I think this is OK by him?’” Perhaps, I surmise, his sense of being part of a Russian literary lineage has given him that confidence. He nods. “I think you’re right. I feel terribly at home in Russian, and it’s an emotional thing as well as an intellectual thing.” Nicolas dreams in Russian (although also, he confesses, in English, French, German and Italian) and that sense of comfort and closeness is, I think, what helps to make this new translation so wonderfully evocative, whether it is describing the “little white fleecy cloudlets” of the wide Russian sky or the “bold, impudent, assertive cry” of a newborn baby. For Nicolas, finishing the translation felt like “the end of a long journey’. Reading Anna Karenina has always felt like that to me. This new translation makes the journey particularly enjoyable.