Anna Karenina (Barnes & Noble Classics) | Leo Tolstoy | The Essential Russian Romance Novel

Anna Karenina (Barnes & Noble Classics) | Leo Tolstoy | Looks Good

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Anna Karenina (Bar...

	Anna Karenina (Barnes & Noble Classics) Leo Tolstoy Barnes & Noble Classics, 2004 - 832 pages average customer review:based on 8 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Anna Karenina, by Leo Tolstoy, is part of the Barnes & Noble Classics series, which offers quality editions at affordable prices to the student and the general reader, including new scholarship, thoughtful design, and pages of carefully crafted extras. Here are some of the remarkable features of Barnes & Noble Classics: New introductions commissioned from today's top writers and scholars Biographies of the authors Chronologies of contemporary historical, biographical, and cultural events Footnotes and endnotes Selective discussions of imitations, parodies, poems, books, plays, paintings, operas, statuary, and films inspired by the work Comments by other famous authors Study questions to challenge the reader's viewpoints and expectations Bibliographies for further reading Indices & Glossaries, when appropriateAll editions are beautifully designed and are printed to superior specifications; some include illustrations of historical interest. Barnes & Noble Classics pulls together a constellation of influences?biographical, historical, and literary?to enrich each reader's understanding of these enduring works.
Vladimir Nabokov called Leo Tolstoy?s Anna Karenina ?one of the greatest love stories in world literature.? Matthew Arnold claimed it was not so much a work of art as ?a piece of life.? Set in imperial Russia, Anna Karenina is a rich and complex meditation on passionate love and disastrous infidelity.

Married to a powerful government minister, Anna Karenina is a beautiful woman who falls deeply in love with a wealthy army officer, the elegant Count Vronsky. Desperate to find truth and meaning in her life, she rashly defies the conventions of Russian society and leaves her husband and son to live with her lover. Condemned and ostracized by her peers and prone to fits of jealousy that alienate Vronsky, Anna finds herself unable to escape an increasingly hopeless situation.

Set against this tragic affair is the story of Konstantin Levin, a melancholy landowner whom Tolstoy based largely on himself. While Anna looks for happiness through love, Levin embarks on his own search for spiritual fulfillment through marriage, family, and hard work. Surrounding these two central plot threads are dozens of characters whom Tolstoy seamlessly weaves together, creating a breathtaking tapestry of nineteenth-century Russian society.

From its famous opening sentence??Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way??to its stunningly tragic conclusion, this enduring tale of marriage and adultery plumbs the very depths of the human soul.

Amy Mandelker, Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, is the author of Framing Anna Karenina: Tolstoy, the Woman Question, and the Victorian Novel and coeditor of Approaches to Teaching Anna Karenina.

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The Essential Russian Romance Novel

This review is titled such as "War And Peace" simply has to much happening. Anna Karenina was more focused and is a great deal more developed. This book is one of the greatest novels ever written and by far one of the most thoughtful. The fact that Oprah includes it in her book club leads me to believe that maybe she isn't the cancer on the intellect of American housewives I once thought her to be.

Looks Good

Haven't had a chance to read the book yet. But, it looks like it will be a great read. The book came as promised. It appears to be a high quality printing. If you are looking for this classic, I do recommend this printing.

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Beautiful language at points, needed editing.

I picked up Anna Karenina at the end of December, and finally, in the beginning of March, I have finished it. Tolstoy deserves much praise for his writing- when it works- but if this whale of a book were published today, you can bet critics would berate him for his self-indulgent over-writing. There are simply too many characters who do not add to the story. I can't tell you how bored I was with any section involving Sergey Ivanovitch. In addition to this, the language is unbearably florid at times. When it works, as in the opening line of the work which reviewers love to repeat, and in naturalistic scenes such as the hunting trip Lenin takes with his guests, it is splendid. Often, it is overly heavy and unpleasantly untidy.

That is not to say that I did not enjoy this book. It's quite good, and it has some masterfully explored themes. But it is just a book, like so many others, and I don't believe it has stood the test of time as well as many believe it to have done. The characters, while well explored, do not have the same striking realism as, for example, its contemporary, Moby Dick, which paints even minor characters such as Pip the cabin boy with detail and quirks of humanity utterly absent from frustrating Vronsky. With all those page-long paragraphs, couldn't Tolstoy have tempered his emotionally explosive characters with humanizing, individualized personalities?

If you've got just three months to live and want to read one more classic in this human existence, pick Melville over Tolstoy.

As to this Barnes and Noble version- it's very nice, for a fair price. The text is tiny, but you'd need that otherwise the book would be too big to take onto an airplane. Plus, the end notes are very useful for context, although they tended to explain elements of religion that I figured to be common knowledge, while leaving some other things unexplained. But these are trifling matters. The organization of the book is pleasant and intuitive.

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Two different books!

Anna Karenina is the classic tale of a married 18th-century Russian woman who falls in love with another man, leaves her husband and child for him, then has to face the consequences of those actions. This was my first Tolstoy to finish (been reading War & Peace on and off for a little while now, but am not even close to finishing) and even though the English translation was choppy, I liked the basic story and admire Tolstoy's determination to write about a subject so controversial at that time and so far removed from his own life, in that he's trying to tell what is very much a uniquely woman's story (a married person falling in love with someone else is not unique to women, of course, but the consequences are certainly different, particularly in the era in which Tolstoy is writing).

I enjoyed this book and it held my attention throughout, but it has some major flaws, the main one being that it's like flipping back and forth between two entirely different novels. One is the story of Anna and her torment over her love for Kostya; the other is the story of Lev, a familial connection of Anna's who spends many, many pages giving us every detail of his conflicting emotions over various philosophical, political and sociological points, none of which have anything whatsoever to do with Anna's story. How are these two plot points related? Good question! I see NO real connection between Lev and Anna's stories besides the very thin one of their being related by marriage. Supposedly, the character of Lev is based largely on Tolstoy himself, and if so, he should have saved it for his autobiography and not used Anna's story as a platform for his personal ramblings. It's not that Lev's story wasn't interesting. It was just a different book.

The parts that did relate to exploring the actions and emotions of Anna, her husband and her lover were fairly well done. Aside from the fact that there was too much of Lev's story and it detracted from Anna's, it also seemed like Tolstoy had to struggle to try and get into a woman's head and heart to speak for her. For a man of any generation and culture to try and convey the emotions of a woman is a feat in and of itself, though (and the same goes for women writers who try to write from a male point of view) and he did it as well as can be expected.

I won't give anything away, but let me just say that I'm also a little conflicted about the famous ending. On the one hand I can genuinely appreciate it as the outcome of one particular story that is not necessarily how someone else's story with the same events would have ended, but I also can't help but feel that it's an almost misogynistic conclusion one might expect from a man of that generation and culture. That sounds so militantly feminist but I can't help it! That's just how it struck me. Still, one can't deny its dramatic effect.

There is a new translation of AK out written by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, and it's been getting a lot of attention via Oprah's Book Club and book reviewers. I'm not likely to re-read AK anytime soon, but I might pick up their translation of War & Peace to see if it flows better than the one I have. At any rate, everyone is saying that if you're planning to read English translations of either Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky, the Pevear/Volokhonsky versions best capture the original feel.

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Painful story of the results of making poor choices

I love the account about Teddy Roosevelt that David McCullough gave at a commencement speech:

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. . . Once upon a time in the dead of winter in Dakota territory, with the temperature well below zero, young Theodore Roosevelt took off in a makeshift boat, accompanied by two of his ranch hands, down-stream on the Little Missouri River in chase of a couple of thieves who had stolen his prized row boat. After days on the river, he caught up and got the draw on them with his trusty Winchester, at which point they surrendered. Then, after finding a man with a team and a wagon, Roosevelt set off again to haul the thieves cross-country to justice. He left the ranch hands behind to tend to the boat, and walked alone behind the wagon, his rifle at the ready. They were headed across the snow covered wastes of the Bad Lands to the rail head at Dickinson, and Roosevelt walked the whole way, 40 miles. It was an astonishing feat, what might be called a defining moment in that eventful life. But what makes it especially memorable is that during that time, he managed to read all of Anna Karenina."
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Then David said: "I often think of that when I hear people say they haven't time to read."

Well I did it. I finally read Anna Karenina.

The story displays life in Russia in the 1870s. There are broad strokes taking place in at a variety of places, with a wide range of characters. One of the main characters is Anna Karenina. Anna falls in love for Count Alexei Kirillovich Vronsky. Vronsky falls in love for Anna. Anna leaves her husband and runs away with Vronsky.

While reading this I often thought that so many problems would be avoided if people just did the right thing. Anna ended up destroying so many lives.

I can't say I enjoyed the book. I found it interesting. I'm glad I finally read it. But it wasn't a fun book. It wasn't uplifting. It was a class Russian novel and most everyone suffers.

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reviews: page 1, 2

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