Anna Karenina (Bantam Classics)
- Authors
- Tolstoy, Leo
- Publisher
- Modern Library
- Tags
- classics , romance
- ISBN
- 9780553902297
- Date
- 1877-01-01T00:00:00+00:00
- Size
- 1.71 MB
- Lang
- en
This edition, the famous Constance Garnett translation, has been revised throughout by Leonard J. Kent and Nina Berberova.
"Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." So begins Anna Karenina , Leo Tolstoy's great modern novel of an adulterous affair set against the backdrop of Moscow and St. Petersburg high society in the later half of the nineteenth century. A sophisticated woman who is respectably married to a government bureaucrat, Anna begins a passionate, all-consuming involvement with a rich army officer. Refusing to conduct a discreet affair, she scandalizes society by abandoning both her husband and her young son for Count Vronsky--with tragic consequences. Running parallel is the story of the courtship and marriage of Konstantin Levin (the melancholy nobleman who is Tolstoy's stand-in) and Princess Kitty Shcherbatsky.
Levin's spiritual searching and growth reflect the religious ideals that at the time Tolstoy was evolving for himself. Taken together, the two plots embroider a vast canvas that ultimately encompasses all levels of Russian society. "Now and then Tolstoy's novel writes its own self, is produced by its matter, but its subject," noted Vladimir Nabokov. " Anna Karenina is one of the greatest love stories in world literature." As Matthew Arnold wrote in his celebrated essay on Tolstoy: "We are not to take Anna Karenina as a work of art; we are to take it as a piece of life."