Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy (early printing)

S$125.00

Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy (early printing)

S$125.00

Title: Anna Karenina
Author: Count Lyof N. Tolstoi, Nathan Haskell Dole (trans), Paul Frenzeny (illus)
Publisher: Walter Scott. No date, but research reveals it to be early 1900s.
Condition: Hardcover, gilt to spine and cover. Front cover and spine bright, clean. Some spotting to back cover. Old bookseller’s price on fly leaf, water stain to the last few pages of book, text unaffected. Minor tanning to end papers. Text clean, bright, unmarked. Reserved.

SKU: tolstoy-anna-scott Categories: ,

Our copy is an early UK printing of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, the best book ever written” according to William Faulkner. This is not a 1st English edition – the first English edition was published in America by Thomas Crowell. The first UK printing of the book was published by Walter Scott, and is identical in content to our copy, except that it was issued as a 2 volume set. Ours is most probably a 2nd issue, based on research and the catalogue listed at the back of the book. This edition was probably printed during Tolstoy’s lifetime, and is, like the 1st edition, a translation authorized by Tolstoy himself.

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.