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Book of the Week

11 years ago

Anna Karenina / Leo Tolstoy.

I just finished reading this book for the second time and enjoyed it just as much on re-reading. It is so detailed and rich, and covers universal themes of the hazards of courtship, tricky marriage relationships, government corruption, and society's treatment (freezing out) of "fallen women" with tragic consequences. There is nothing slapdash and quickly run-through here, it's a book to be enjoyed for its picture of another culture and another time, but with striking similarities to our own. Although it was published in 1877 and has been translated from the original Russian, the novel is quite easy to read. It is a substantial size and it's astounding to think that Tolstoy also found the time to write War and Peace, along with several other works.

Amazon review: 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."

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