Anna Karenina (Barnes & Noble Classics Series)

by Leo Tolstoy, Amy Mandelker (Introduction), Constance Garnett (Translator)

Overview

Anna Karenina, by Leo Tolstoy, is part of the Barnes & Noble Classics series, which offers quality editions at affordable prices to the student and the general reader, including new scholarship, thoughtful design, and pages of carefully crafted extras. Here are some of the remarkable features of Barnes & Noble Classics:

• New introductions commissioned from today's top writers and scholars
• Biographies of the authors
• Chronologies of contemporary historical, biographical, and cultural events
• Footnotes and endnotes
• Selective discussions of imitations, parodies, poems, books, plays, paintings, operas, statuary, and films inspired by the work
• Comments by other famous authors
• Study questions to challenge the reader's viewpoints and expectations
• Bibliographies for further reading
• Indices & Glossaries, when appropriate

All editions are beautifully designed and are printed to superior specifications; some include illustrations of historical interest. Barnes & Noble Classics pulls together a constellation of influences—biographical, historical, and literary—to enrich each reader's understanding of these enduring works.
 
Vladimir Nabokov called Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina “one of the greatest love stories in world literature.” Matthew Arnold claimed it was not so much a work of art as “a piece of life.” Set in imperial Russia, Anna Karenina is a rich and complex meditation on passionate love and disastrous infidelity.

Married to a powerful government minister, Anna Karenina is a beautiful woman who falls deeply in love with a wealthy army officer, the elegant Count Vronsky. Desperate to find truth and meaning in her life, she rashly defies the conventions of Russian society and leaves her husband and son to live with her lover. Condemned and ostracized by her peers and prone to fits of jealousy that alienate Vronsky, Anna finds herself unable to escape an increasingly hopeless situation.

Set against this tragic affair is the story of Konstantin Levin, a melancholy landowner whom Tolstoy based largely on himself. While Anna looks for happiness through love, Levin embarks on his own search for spiritual fulfillment through marriage, family, and hard work. Surrounding these two central plot threads are dozens of characters whom Tolstoy seamlessly weaves together, creating a breathtaking tapestry of nineteenth-century Russian society.

From its famous opening sentence—“Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way”—to its stunningly tragic conclusion, this enduring tale of marriage and adultery plumbs the very depths of the human soul.

Amy Mandelker, Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, is the author of Framing Anna Karenina: Tolstoy, the Woman Question, and the Victorian Novel and coeditor of Approaches to Teaching Anna Karenina.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781411431775
Publisher:	Barnes & Noble
Publication date:	06/01/2009
Series:	Barnes & Noble Classics Series
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	832
Sales rank:	35,916
File size:	3 MB
Age Range:	3 Months to 18 Years

About the Author

Count Leo Tolstoy was born in 1828 on the family estate of Yasnaya Polyana, in the Tula province, where he spent most of his early years, together with his several brothers. In 1844 he entered the University of Kazan to read Oriental Languages and later Law, but left before completing a degree. He spent the following years in a round of drinking, gambling and womanizing, until weary of his idle existence he joined an artillery regiment in the Caucasus in 1851.

He took part in the Crimean war and after the defence of Sevastopol wrote The Sevastopol Sketches (1855-6), which established his literary reputation. After leaving the army in 1856 Tolstoy spent some time mixing with the literati in St Petersburg before traveling abroad and then settling at Yasnaya Polyana, where he involved himself in the running of peasant schools and the emancipation of the serfs. His marriage to Sofya Andreyevna Behrs in 1862 marked the beginning of a period of contentment centred around family life; they had thirteen children. Tolstoy managed his vast estates, continued his educational projects, cared for his peasants and wrote both his great novels, War and Peace (1869) and Anna Karenina (1877).

During the 1870s he underwent a spiritual crisis, the moral and religious ideas that had always dogged him coming to the fore. A Confession (1879¿82) marked an outward change in his life and works; he became an extreme rationalist and moralist, and in a series of pamphlets written after 1880 he rejected church and state, indicted the demands of flesh, and denounced private property. His teachings earned him numerous followers in Russia and abroad, and also led finally to his excommunication by the Russian Holy Synod in 1901. In 1910 at the age of eighty-two he fled from home "leaving this worldly life in order to live out my last days in peace and solitude;" he died some days later at the station master's house at Astapovo.

Author biography courtesy of Penguin Books LTD.

Date of Birth:

September 9, 1828

Date of Death:

November 2, 1910

Place of Birth:

Tula Province, Russia

Place of Death:

Astapovo, Russia

Education:

Privately educated by French and German tutors; attended the University of Kazan, 1844-47

Read an Excerpt

From Amy Mandelker's Introduction to Anna Karenina

The literary fragments by Pushkin that inspired Tolstoy to sit down and begin writing Anna Karenina were sketches for a novel about an adulteress who is ultimately cast off by her lover and society. The plot of adulterous love, the story of a doomed impossible passion, is common in Western European literature and typically creates a narrative that links love and death. Indeed Tolstoy had in his library that most famous nineteenth-century culmination of the literary tradition of adulterous love and death, Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary. Yet Russian literary history had no native tradition comparable to Troubadoran love poetry, the cult of courtly love, the idea of the liebestod, or the novels of adulterous passion that capped the poetic tradition. Despite early sentimental prose accounts of young girls drowning themselves for unrequited love, like Nikolai Karamzin's Poor Liza, Russian literature as it matured in the nineteenth century tended to invert and caricature European prose forms rather than directly imitating them. Indeed in his article "Some Words about War and Peace," Tolstoy insisted that his work was not a novel, pronouncing with characteristic national pride and eccentricity that Russians did not even know how to write novels in the European sense of the word.

Such an announcement of disregard for conventional form in art might seem presumptuous were it premeditated, and were there not precedents for it. But the history of Russian literature since the time of Pushkin not merely affords many examples of such deviations from European forms, but does not offer a single example of the contrary. From Gogol's Dead Souls to Dostoevsky's House of the Dead, in the recent period of Russian literature there is not a single artistic prose work, rising at all above mediocrity, which quite fits into the form of a novel, epic, or story (Bayley, Tolstoy and the Novel, p 64).

It is highly significant, therefore, that when Tolstoy began work on Anna Karenina, he described it as "the first novel I have attempted."

Tolstoy's characterization of Russian literature as resistant to European literary shapes and narrative trajectories is certainly apt. The founding work of the nineteenth-century Russian novelistic tradition was Aleksandr Pushkin's novel in verse Eugene Onegin. The idea of a novel in verse is itself unusual, and Pushkin's experimental form includes the invention of a new verse pattern, the Onegin stanza. Furthermore, he stages a narrative reversal of the liebestod by evacuating his love story of desire and thereby eliminating the fuel that fires the Western European romance. In the case of classic European star-crossed lovers, from Tristan and Isolde to Romeo and Juliet, the impossibility of their union generates a heated desire that only increases in response to obstacles. The lovers desire nothing so much as to perpetuate their longing for one another, a yearning that betrays its metaphysical dimension and shades into death-a death of the body that releases the ardent spirit.

In the earliest drafts of Anna Karenina, the heroine is named for Pushkin's heroine, Tatiana, a naive country girl who, addicted to French novels and infatuated with the literary representation of ruinous love, projects a romantic silhouette onto the novel's eponymous protagonist, Eugene. He not only refuses, rather discourteously, to sexually ravish and ruin the heroine, but he apparently has no desire to do so; instead he turns his disordered impulses against his poet friend, Lensky, whom he eliminates in a duel before his departure for Western Europe. In Onegin's absence, Tatiana peruses the stacks of his personal library to discover that her beloved is an empty cloak, a mere parody, a "paper bullet of the brain." Years later, returning to Russia, Eugene discovers the same young girl who once made love to him in the person of a society grande dame, the wife of a military grandee. But Tatiana has lost her desire for Eugene at the moment he discovers his desire for her; spurned, he rushes from the pages of the novel to seek his death.

It is fairly clear that in taking up the well-used plot of adulterous love in response to Pushkin's sketches, Tolstoy intended to quiz the ethos of love and death that spiritualized into tragedy the adulterous love stories of Western European literature. Initially he sketches his heroine satirically: She is fat, vulgar, and obvious; she chomps on her pearl necklace and flirts openly with her lover in her husband's face. But these omens of overindulged physicality vanish in the final characterizations of Anna Karenina, whose grace, vitality, maternal warmth, and beauty are instead slowly and painfully extinguished over the inexorable course of the novel. It is her lover who becomes coarse: An artistic, sensitive man in the earlier drafts, by the final version he is a dilettante and a poor sportsman, riding his lovely racehorse to death through his own corpulence and clumsiness. He becomes a corporeal "hunk of beefsteak" who runs to fat and loses his hair and teeth. In similar fashion, the husband, a more sympathetic type in the first versions of the novel, becomes physically grotesque in the novel as we read it, with his huge ears, stammer, and unpleasant habit of cracking his knuckles.

Satirical impulses are directed at every other character in the novel: the bon vivant (Anna's brother, Stiva), the sanctimonious religious hypocrite (Countess Lydia Ivanovna), the society flirt (Countess Betsy Tverskaya), the careerist (Karenin). The heroine, Anna, is protected from the broad brushstroke of social critique, but whether she is meant to be portrayed as a victim or a participant in the book's destructive social machinery is the highly debated question the novel puts to us.

The moral transgressions of adultery and the violations of social proprieties as understood by nineteenth-century Russian high society can hardly come under censure by today's reader: Anna Karenina remains as sympathetic and compelling as any heroine in literature. Writers like D. H. Lawrence claim for Anna and her lover the role of sympathetic martyrs, crushed beneath the wheels of an implacably conventional and hypocritical society; but Tolstoy was to be condemned for "putting his finger in the balance" to bring the novel to a moralistic conclusion. Yet Anna's suffering may not be entirely due to her moral transgressions and afflicted conscience, just as her experience of social ostracism and rejection cannot fully account for the growing sense of explosive inner turmoil, psychological conflict, and distress she undergoes.