Anna Karenina

by Leo Tolstoy

Mona Simpson (Introduction), Constance Garnett (Translator), Leonard J. Kent, and Nina Berberova

Considered by some to be the greatest novel ever written, Anna Karenina is Tolstoy's classic tale of love and adultery set against the backdrop of high society in Moscow and Saint Petersburg. A rich and complex masterpiece, the novel charts the disastrous course of a love affair between Anna, a beautiful married woman, and Count Vronsky, a wealthy army officer. Tolstoy seamlessly weaves together the lives of dozens of characters, and in doing so captures a breathtaking tapestry of late-nineteenth-century Russian society. 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."

• ISBN10: 067978330X
• ISBN13: 9780679783305
• Publish Date: 10 October 2000 (first published 7 May 1905)
• Publish Status: Active
• Publish Country: US
• Imprint: Modern Library
• Format: Paperback (US Trade)
• Pages: 976
• Language: English
• URL: https://penguinrandomhouse.com/books/isbn/9780679783305

Reviews

[Michael @ Knowledge Lost]

Anna Karenina is the tragic story of the socialite’s marriage to Karenin and her affair with the wealthy Count Vronsky. The novel begins in the midst of their families break up due to her brother’s constant womanising; a situation that preferences her own situation throughout the novel. Running in parallel to this story of Konstantin Levin, a humble country landowner that wishes to marry Kitty, who is Anna’s sister in-law. Anna Karenina is a pinnacle piece of realist literature, exploring a wide range of family issues.

At over 800 pages, Anna Karenina can be a daunting novel to pick up; the large cast of characters does not make it any easier. I look at this classic novel as an exploration into melodrama that just about every family experiences. Born in 1828, Lev (Leo) Nikolaevich Tolstoy was born into a large and wealthy Russian landowning family, and has often been suggested that Anna Karenina is based on a similar social upbringing. While there are vast differences, issues with wealth, religion, farming and morality are issues that seem to parallel between reality and fiction. The story arch of Levin is considered to be autobiographical; Tolstoy’s first name is Lev (although in English he is known as Leo) and the Russian surname Levin actually means Lev.

Leo Tolstoy has been known for adding real life events into his fiction as a way with dealing with current political and social issues. Within Anna Karenina, events like the liberal reforms initiated by Emperor Alexander II of Russia and the judicial reform are used as the backdrop for the novel. This allows him to explore current issues, like the developing of Russian into the industrial age and the role of agriculture in these changing times. Also Tolstoy questions the role of the woman in this changing society and (the ever popular in Russian lit) class struggles.

The story of Anna Karenina is probably the most interesting for me and I enjoyed reading the struggle between love and the public opinion. She was trapped in a marriage and wanted to divorce but Karenin, who was a politician cared more about his public image. Then there is the fact that Anna’s brothers womanising destroyed the family and now she is faced with a similar situation that could cause the same damage. Adultery becomes a big theme within the book and seems to be a common theme within Russian literature to this day. However with Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter (1850) and Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1857), these three novels seemed to start a fascination in exploring the themes of passion and adultery in the mid to late nineteenth century.

There is a lot to explore within this book, and re-reading Anna Karenina was such an enjoyable experience. I know big books often scare me but there is something about going back to a much-loved novel that I find enjoyable. Leo Tolstoy intentionally made this novel long, he wanted to replicate life’s journey and the struggles people face along the way. I think he was able to capture that struggle and Anna Karenina will remain a favourite on my shelves and in Russian literature. There are so many more themes that could be explored within the novel but I will leave that for others to discover on their own.

This review originally appeared on my blog; http://literary-exploration.com/2015/05/28/anna-karenina-by-leo-tolstoy/

[anastasia]

Anna Karenina is one of the two main characters in the novel she is an aristocrat from St. Petersburg, Russia. This story takes place in the 1800s, where adultery and divorce was illegal. She captures the attention of everyone in society by the way she carries herself. She commits adultery; she cannot live without her lover. She is well mannered and outspoken. She is a young married woman, who has one young son. Unfortunately she sees a very handsome young man, named Vronsky, and she instantly becomes attracted to him, when their eyes meet. Vronsky is wealthy, he is a military officer. He is passionate, and caring for Anna. He becomes charmed by her beauty upon meeting her. She has an affair with him and commits adultery. She cannot live without her lover, even though her husband tells her to leave him. She is now pregnant with her lovers child, and her husband loves her so much that he is willing to raise the child as his own, as long as she leaves her lover, Vronsky. Her husband Karenin is a high-ranking Government Minister, who forgives her of committing adultery.


Anna is the beautiful, passionate, and educated wife of Alexei Karenin, a cold and passionless government official. Her character is rich in complexity: she is guilty of desecrating her marriage and home, for instance, but she remains noble and admirable nonetheless. Anna is intelligent and literate, a reader of English novels and a writer of children's books. She is elegant, always understated in her dress. Her many years with Karenin show her capable of playing the role of cultivated, beautiful, society wife and hostess with great poise and grace. She is very nearly the ideal aristocratic Russian wife of the 1870s.


Her affair throws her into social exile, misery and eventually makes her commit suicide, because her love moves on with someone else.


The other main character is Levin. He is independent-minded and socially awkward. He is truly an individual character who fits into none of the obvious classifications of Russian society. Levin is his own person. He follows his own vision of things, even when it is confused and foggy, rather than adopting any group's prefabricated views. Moreover, Levin prefers isolation over fitting in with a social set with which he is not wholly comfortable. In this he resembles Anna, whose story is a counterpart to his own in its search for self-definition and individual happiness.


He falls in love with Kitty, Anna's friend, despite that they are from different social classes. Kitty being a Princess, and Levin being a Peasant. The two, struggle to find each other and happiness as they create a life together. . She gives up being a princess because she loves him, and she moves to his farm and becomes a peasant.




[THEMES]
Adultery

Social issue
Society will react negatively to this adultery
Karenin > willing to overlook Anna's affair as long as she doesn't want to get a divorce
Anna tries to escape society in Italy and on the country side
Social criticism/marital betrayal


Forgiveness

Forgiveness are sometimes compromised >Dolly forgiving Stiva for cheating
When Anna begs Karenin [has little effect> Anna continues loving Vronsky]
Ongoing process that may grow or diminish
Anna begs for forgiveness before committing suicide
Overall, I really enjoyed both the novel and the film. I usually don't read novels in this genre, but I really liked this one. If you get a chance, you should definitely check this book out! I highly recommend it!

Happy Reading!

-Ana @SoManyBooksSoLittleTime

This review will is also posted on my blog

[clq]

I won't bother trying to summarise Anna Karenina, as that's probably been done way too many times by people who do it much better than me. Falling in love, falling out of love, jealousy, finding meaning in life, losing the meaning in ones life, the meaning of religion, etc. etc. It's all in there. Various philosophies of farming is even covered in rather considerable debt. That is also part of the problem with this book. I don't mind long books, in fact, I rather like them, but this one just got a little too long.

Mind you, it is easy to see why it is long. The story is very much driven by the characters in it, making it necessary to spend a long time describing the characters and their thoughts. This results in my favourite aspect of the book: the character's actions are very believable most of the time. Because the reader knows the characters rather well, the way in which they react to situations seems natural. The characters are all quite different, and much time is spent describing their outlook on life, their thoughts on the world and other important matters. During most of the book this becomes a natural part of the story, as, after all, the story is driven based on the character's outlooks on these very things.

Unfortunately the book ends a little too late. I didn't mind it going on for a bit after the obvious place in which it could have ended, but personally I feel like the ending, in a sense, resolved something which I think would have been better left unresolved. It doesn't help matters that the only justification for the last 60 pages seemed to be the author's desire to make the very point I didn't want to see made. Overall though, I rather liked Anna Karenina, but it is possible that I might have liked an abridged version better. And this is the first time I have thought that about a book.