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  • Published: 27 February 2017
  • ISBN: 9781784871956
  • Imprint: Vintage Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 992
  • RRP: $22.99

Anna Karenina (Vintage Classic Russians Series)




The Vintage Classics Russians Series - sumptuous editions of the greatest books to come out of Russia during the most tumultuous period in its history

'One of the greatest love stories in world literature' Vladimir Nabokov

Anna is a beautiful, intelligent woman whose passionate affair with the dashing Count Vronsky leads her to ruin. But her story is also about a search for meaning, and by twinning it with that of Levin, an awkward idealist whose happy marriage and domestic trials form the backdrop for a similar quest, Tolstoy creates a rich and complex masterpiece that has captured the imagination of readers for decades.

'I've read and re-read this novel and every time I find another layer in the story' Philippa Gregory

TRANSLATED BY LOUISE AND AYLMER MAUDE

The Vintage Classics Russians Series - sumptuous editions of the greatest books to come out of Russia during the most tumultuous period in its history.

  • Published: 27 February 2017
  • ISBN: 9781784871956
  • Imprint: Vintage Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 992
  • RRP: $22.99

About the author

Leo Tolstoy

Leo Tolstoy was born in central Russia in 1828. He studied Oriental languages and law (although failed to earn a degree in the latter) at the University of Kazan, and after a dissolute youth eventually joined an artillery regiment in the Caucasus in 1851. He took part in the Crimean War, and the Sebastopol Sketches that emerged from it established his reputation. After living for some time in St Petersburg and abroad, he married Sophie Behrs in 1862 and they had thirteen children. The happiness this brought him gave him the creative impulse for his two greatest novels, War and Peace (1869) and Anna Karenina (1877). Later in life his views became increasingly radical as he gave up his possessions to live a simple peasant life. After a quarrel with his wife he fled home secretly one night to seek refuge in a monastery. He became ill during this dramatic flight and died at the small railway station of Astapovo in 1910.

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Praise for Anna Karenina (Vintage Classic Russians Series)

One of the greatest love stories in world literature

Vladimir Nabokov

Tolstoy's historical and human sweep is breathtaking. His vision, humanity and his knowledge that love and pain are at the heart of life is the most important of all the profound truths revealed in this great novel

Jonathan Dimbleby

In Anna Karenina, Tolstoy got totally inside the mind of a woman who is prepared to lose everything for the sake of man and who is so much in love that she commits suicide. I don't like her as a woman, but I think it is a brilliant portrait, unequalled in literature

Amanda Craig, Independent

I've read and re-read this novel and every time I find another layer in the story

Philippa Gregory

I first read Anna Karenina 20 years ago when travelling across the Peruvian desert on a long bus journey, and it has stayed with me ever since

Hugh Thomson, Independent

Anyone who has read Anna Karenina will be aware of its extraordinary power as an epic psychological tale of a woman who gives up her husband and son for the sake of an affair with a handsome army officer. It has humour but, as with all of Tolstoy's works, it is completely without sentimentality

Mail on Sunday

I just love this classic romance about a married mother who succumbs to an unsuitable lover and becomes pregnant by him, which of course results in all sorts of pressures and heartache. The best love story ever told

Kay Burley

Probably one of the greatest novelistic treatments of the torments of love

Daily Mail
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