Anna Karenina
Info
- Author: Leo Tolstoy
- Genre: Eastern European
- Publisher: Signet Classics
- Type: Official Novel Book
- Release: Nov 05, 2002
- ASIN/ISBN: 0451528611
- Rating:
- Status: Read (960 Pages)
Review
On Oct 25, 2007 Corinne said:
"Anna Karenina tells of the doomed love affair between the sensuous and rebellious Anna and the dashing officer, Count Vronsky. Tragedy unfolds as Anna rejects her passionless marriage and must endure the hypocrisies of society. Set against a vast and richly textured canvas of nineteenth-century Russia, the novel's seven major characters create a dynamic imbalance, playing out the contrasts of city and country life and all the variations on love and family happiness.
While previous versions have softened the robust, and sometimes shocking, quality of Tolstoy's writing, Pevear and Volokhonsky have produced a translation true to his powerful voice. This award-winning team's authoritative edition also includes an illuminating introduction and explanatory notes. Beautiful, vigorous, and eminently readable, this Anna Karenina will be the definitive text for generations to come."
Details
Anna Karenina is widely regarded to be an even greater achievement of tragedy and of the novel form than War and Peace had been the decade before. Tolstoy began it in 1873 and concluded it in 1877. It is the story of a fashionable married woman, Anna Karenina, who arrives in St Petersberg to meet Stepan Arkadyevitch but meets with him another man. This man, Count Vronsky, is strangely attracted to Anna from the outset and she begins to feel for him too. Anna recalls her cold-blooded and cynical husband who is twenty years her senior. He never shows her any affection and considers her to be a trophy. The Count contrives to meet Anna again through his friendship with Stepan, with whom Anna is residing. The novel then follows this liaison as it begin and then ends horribly as Anna’s husband Karenin finds out about the affair. Anna is brought down by others’ passions and power over her and she is driven, after many twists and turns in her fortunes and those of her lovers, to throw herself under the wheels of a train. It is one of the most famous suicides in literary history but to know of its inevitability only makes the tragedy of Anna’s life more cathartic and sad.