Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy ( 2 vols)

S$63.00

Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy ( 2 vols)

S$63.00

Title: Anna Karenina

Author: Leo Tolstoy, Rochelle S. Townsend (trans), Roland Topor (illus)

Publisher: Heron Books, 1967.

Condition: Hardcover, faux leather. 2 vols, complete. Good. Foxing to top edge of book, with very slight foxing to other edges. With black-and-white illustrations. App 8.5″ x 5.5″. Overseas shipping will cost extra.

SKU: anna-karenina-heron Categories: ,

About the book (from Wikipedia):

Anna Karenina is a novel by the Russian writer Leo Tolstoy, published in serial installments from 1873 to 1877 in the periodical The Russian Messenger.

Widely regarded as a pinnacle in realist fiction, Tolstoy considered Anna Karenina his first true novel.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky declared it to be “flawless as a work of art”. His opinion was shared by Vladimir Nabokov, who especially admired “the flawless magic of Tolstoy’s style”, and by William Faulkner, who described the novel as “the best ever written”.The novel is currently enjoying popularity, as demonstrated by a recent poll of 125 contemporary authors by J. Peder Zane, published in 2007 in “The Top Ten” in Time, which declared that Anna Karenina is the “greatest novel ever written”.

Plot summary:

Anna Karenina is the tragedy of married aristocrat and socialite Anna Karenina and her affair with the affluent Count Vronsky. The story starts when she arrives in the midst of a family broken up by her brother’s unbridled womanizing — something that prefigures her own later situation, though she would experience less tolerance by others.

A bachelor, Vronsky is eager to marry her if she would agree to leave her husband Karenin, a government official, but she is vulnerable to the pressures of Russian social norms, her own insecurities, and Karenin’s indecision. Although Vronsky and Anna go to Italy, where they can be together, they have trouble making friends. Back in Russia, she is shunned, becoming further isolated and anxious, while Vronsky pursues his social life. Despite Vronsky’s reassurances, she grows increasingly possessive and paranoid about his imagined infidelity, fearing loss of control.

A parallel story within the novel is that of Konstantin Levin, a country landowner who desires to marry Kitty, sister to Dolly and sister-in-law to Anna’s brother Oblonsky. Konstantin has to propose twice before Kitty accepts. The novel details Konstantin’s difficulties managing his estate, his eventual marriage, and his personal issues, until the birth of his first child.

The novel explores a diverse range of topics throughout its approximately thousand pages. Some of these topics include an evaluation of the feudal system that existed in Russia at the time; politics, in not only the Russian government but also at the level of the individual characters and families; and religion and morality.