Some things you can’t take back, or unsay. Many years ago I told the wife of a friend that I really wanted to read Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. No problem there, but I pronounced the title Anna (so far, so good), Karen-ina.
Sometime in the 2000s I learned the correct pronunciation, or at least I thought I learned it. I kept hearing it pronounced Anna Kerr-renn-ninna. If that’s how everyone was pronouncing it, so would I. At which point I looked back in horror at my old pronunciation. Surely the wife of my friend thought me a philistine for so thoroughly butchering the pronunciation? I was embarrassed for the longest time, but it turns out needlessly. Why? It turns out the popular pronunciation is similarly incorrect, and arguably more flawed than the one I used initially.
Evidence supporting my claim is British writer Viv Groskop’s excellent 2018 book, The Anna Karenina Fix. A very accessible collection of essays about the most important Russian novels, Groskop alerted readers to the true pronunciation: it’s Anna “’Kar-ray-ni-na’, with the emphasis on the ‘ray.’” So there you go. Mystery solved.
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