> Skip to content
[]
Play sample
  • Published: 15 December 2000
  • ISBN: 9780679783305
  • Imprint: Random House US Group
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 976
  • RRP: $45.00

Anna Karenina




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

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."

  • Published: 15 December 2000
  • ISBN: 9780679783305
  • Imprint: Random House US Group
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 976
  • RRP: $45.00

Other books in the series

Emma
Persuasion
The Black Tulip
The Lady of the Camellias
Selected Poetry
On Sparta
Man and Superman
Saint Joan
Love
Annals
Military Dispatches

About the author

Leo Tolstoy

Leo Tolstoy was born in 1828 in the Tula province. He studied at the University of Kazan, then led a life of pleasure until 1851 when he joined an artillery regiment in the Caucasus. He established his reputation as a writer with The Sebastopol Sketches (1855-6). After a period in St Petersburg and abroad, he married, had thirteen children, managed his vast estates in the Volga Steppes and wrote War and Peace (1869) and Anna Karenina (1877). A Confession (1879-82) marked a spiritual crisis in his life, and in 1901 he was excommuincated by the Russian Holy Synod. He died in 1910, in the course of a dramatic flight from home, at the railway station of Astapovo.

Also by Leo Tolstoy

See all

Discover more

Article
14 of the best literary insults perfect for a quick comeback

Some of the biggest burns from classic literature.

penguin pop image
penguin pop image