Anna Karenina: Introduction by John Bayley (Everyman's Library Classics) - Hardcover

Tolstoy, Leo

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0679410007 ISBN 13: 9780679410003

Publisher: Everyman's Library, 1992

Synopsis

A magnificent drama of vengeance, infidelity, and retribution, "Anna Karenina" portrays the moving story of people whose emotions conflict with the dominant social mores of their time. Sensual, rebellious Anna falls deeply and passionately in love with the handsome Count Vronsky. When she refuses to conduct the discreet affair that her cold, ambitious husband (and Russian high society) would condone, she is doomed. Set against the tragic love of Anna and Vronsky, the plight of the melancholy nobleman Konstantine Levin unfolds. In doubt about the meaning of life, haunted by thoughts of suicide, Levin's struggles echo Tolstoy's own spiritual crisis. But Anna's inner turmoil mirrors the own emotional imprisonment and mental disintegration of a woman who dares to transgress the strictures of a patriarchal world. In "Anna Karenina" Leo Tolstoy brought to perfection the novel of social realism and created a masterpiece that bared the Russian soul.

About this title

Review:

"In a novel as good and as spacious as Tolstoy's all things are possible. It must contain, as it does, the muddle and unpredictability of life, its refusal to supply endings or neat situations. And indeed this is where the greatness of the novel will be found to lie. Of all authors Tolstoy is the one whose art most contradicts his own views, and yet the one whose true personality is most revealed in his art. And what is Anna's 'true personality'? It remains to the end not an enigma, but a factor and a phenomenon that is infinitely variable, like life itself."
-from the Introduction by John Bayley

Book Description:

'The greatest love story I've ever read' Andrew Davies

About this edition

• Publisher: Everyman's Library
• Publication date: 1992
• ISBN 10: 0679410007
• ISBN 13: 9780679410003
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 1016