"One of the greatest love stories in world literature."-Vladimir Nabokov "Anna Karenina is a perfect work of art. This novel contains a humane message that has not yet been heeded in Europe and that is much needed by the people of the western world."-Fyodor Dostoevsky "The truth is we are not to take Anna Karenina as a work of art; we are to take it as a piece of life."-Matthew Arnold Although love and infidelity are a major themes of Leo Tolstoy's epic Russian novel Anna Karenina (1877), there is a startling scope of ...
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"One of the greatest love stories in world literature."-Vladimir Nabokov "Anna Karenina is a perfect work of art. This novel contains a humane message that has not yet been heeded in Europe and that is much needed by the people of the western world."-Fyodor Dostoevsky "The truth is we are not to take Anna Karenina as a work of art; we are to take it as a piece of life."-Matthew Arnold Although love and infidelity are a major themes of Leo Tolstoy's epic Russian novel Anna Karenina (1877), there is a startling scope of philosophical and theological insight within the pages of this monumental work. The pinnacle of the realist novel, the commonplace lives and frustrations of the characters within Anna Karenina are woven together in parallel subtexts that ask difficult questions. The story of the extramarital affair between Anna Karenina and the young bachelor Count Vronsky is at the center of this complex work of literature. When Anna's husband discovers the infidelity of his wife, his primary concern is not the well-being of his marriage, but his own self-image. The downward spiral of Anna's illicit behavior is paralleled with the story of Kitty and Konstantin Levin, who is a wealthy agriculturalist but somewhat socially clumsy figure. Levin and Kitty's love is unblemished, yet his struggles with faith and his unrelenting philosophical questioning paint a profound portrait of internal anguish. This classic novel examines the depth of the human soul against the backdrop of 19th-century Russia as no other work of literature has done. With an eye-catching new cover, and professionally typeset manuscript, this edition of Anna Karenina is both modern and readable.
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Add this copy of Anna Karenina to cart. $34.66, new condition, Sold by Ingram Customer Returns Center rated 5.0 out of 5 stars, ships from NV, USA, published 2020 by Mint Editions.
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A strange beauty of a book. If this describes Russia and her people, they are quite as much a mystery as before the book was opened. The descriptions of the countryside will make you feel the icy wind, the motives of the players-you will wonder if some people could ever be so self-centered. A little hard to relate to the material luxuries of nobility.
Nenit C
Dec 16, 2010
Amazing Read!
I love this book.
This book is an absolute classic and everyone should read it!
courtneyinatlanta
Aug 26, 2010
For the masses
It's very long (good lord, Tolstoy, calling you long-winded would be the understatement of the year) and there are many Russian names that sound alike and can be confusing, but this book is excellent. Remember that Tolstoy wrote for the masses, not the elite, and you'll gain a wealth of knowledge about Russian life during Tolstoy's day.
VirginiafromVirginia
Sep 10, 2009
This might have been a great book
I was not able to read it since it was in the written in the Russian language. It is probably always best to read authors in their own language, but since I did not have time to learn Russian, I was not able to read it and placed it in the recycle bin.
rejoyce
Aug 22, 2007
An Essential Tragedy
Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina is a masterpiece that is both compelling and accessible despite its daunting length. The theme of adultery and its disastrous consequences, including Anna's resultant self-loathing, still has currency. Most novelists are content to do one thing well, but Tolstoy's mastery and novelistic skills are manifold: his intimate knowledge of characters, their interaction with society, his rendering of physical action. The horse racing and hunting scenes are thrilling. One almost believes that the word "omniscience" needed to be coined in order to describe Tolstoy's commanding, godlike narrative perspective.
Of course most remarkable is Tolstoy's creation of the title character, who with Flaubert's Madame Bovary, is a fully developed, credible female character. In fact Tolstoy's characters have that full dimensionality, what E.M. Forster referred to as "roundness," that is so satisfying to the reader, even observing the bemusement of children in the face of Anna and Count Vronsky's affair. The farmer Levin's marriage to Kitty, his preoccupations with land reform and God, serve as a kind of moral counterpoint to Anna's adultery, and signal the peasant discontent that would overturn the stability of pre-revolutionary, Czarist Russia in the next century.
Preceding Anna's suicide, her nervous breakdown prefigures modernist interiority to an uncanny degree. In the end, however, it is Anna's essential tragedy that raises Tolstoy's novel to its deserved classic status.
