Folio Society Published Works Number 1879
Tolstoy, Leo - Anna Karenina
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Tolstoy, Leo - Anna Karenina (Published in by The Folio Society in 2008. Introduced by Helen Dunmore. Illustrated by Angela Barrett. Translated by Louise and Aylmer Maude. Quarter-bound in buckram with cloth sides blocked and printed with a design by Angela Barrett. Set in Ehrhardt with Bulmer display. Frontispiece and 14 full-page colour illustrations. 9.5" × 6.25", 768 pages. Anna's story is simple and timeless bored by her calculating husband and eager to live life, rather than read about it in books, she falls in love. In Moscow and Petersburg, such scandals are the stuff of gossip, not tragedy, but Anna refuses to play society's game: hers is a high passion, and though she tries to insist that her lover, Count Vronsky, share it, he begins to dread the very word 'love' and to hanker after simpler pleasures. Against this ruinous affair are set the stories of other loves, other marriages, including the cautious progress to happiness of Kitty and Levin (perhaps a wistful self-portrait of the Tolstoys' early married life). For today's reader, Tolstoy's narrative genius shines through in the portrait he paints of Russia in the latter part of the 19th century drawing rooms, racetracks, officers' clubs, forests and dachas depicted in all their seductive yet hypocritical glory as the setting for Anna's doomed passion. The result, as Vladimir Nabokov said, is 'one of the greatest love stories in world literature'. From its position as first in a list of 125 leading authors' favourite books, it can equally be called one of the greatest novels of all time. )
