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Leo
Tolstoy (1828 -
1910)
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 Anna
Karenina : A Novel in Eight Parts by Leo
Tolstoy, Richard Pevear (Translator), Larissa Volakhonsky
(Translator)
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."
About
the Author
Count Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910) launched his literary career in
1855 with The Sebastopol Sketches, tales inspired by his service
in the Crimean War. In addition to his great novels War and Peace
and Anna Karenina, he wrote many stories, novellas, and essays.
Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky have produced acclaimed
translations of Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Gogol, and Bulgakov. Their
translation of The Brothers Karamazov won the 1991
PEN/Book-of-the-Month Club Translation Prize.
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here for more information on this book
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here for more books by and about Tolstoy
Click
here for 19th Century Philosophy Books
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E-text.
Introduction:
Anna Karenina is widely
regarded to be an even greater achievement of tragedy and of the novel
form than War and Peace had been the decade before. Tolstoy began
it in 1873 and concluded it in 1877. It is the story of a fashionable
married woman, Anna Karenina, who arrives in St Petersberg to meet
Stepan Arkadyevitch but meets with him another man. This man, Count
Vronsky, is strangely attracted to Anna from the outset and she begins
to feel for him too. Anna recalls her cold-blooded and cynical husband
who is twenty years her senior. He never shows her any affection and
considers her to be a trophy. The Count contrives to meet Anna again
through his friendship with Stepan, with whom Anna is residing. The
novel then follows this liaison as it begin and then ends horribly as
Anna’s husband Karenin finds out about the affair. Anna is brought
down by others’ passions and power over her and she is driven, after
many twists and turns in her fortunes and those of her lovers, to throw
herself under the wheels of a train. It is one of the most famous
suicides in literary history but to know of its inevitability only makes
the tragedy of Anna’s life more cathartic and sad.
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by Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy, Distributed by the Tolstoy
Library OnLine; First distributed in Russia in 1882, first published in
1884.
Introduction:
Despite having written War and Peace and Anna
Karenina, Tolstoy, at age 51, looked back on his life and
considered it to be a meaningless, regrettable failure. A
Confession gives insight into Tolstoy's thinking as he began to
forever change his ideas and actions and develop his radical philosophy.
This book was first distributed in 1882 and published in 1884 after some
fun with the censors...
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Full e-text, translated by Constance Garnett
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This is a page of links to relevant sites about
Tolstoy or in some way referenced to Tolstoy.
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From the Anarchist
Library
Excerpt:
Count Leo Tolstoy was baptized Orthodox into a life of
privilege and wealth in Czarist Russia in 1828. His young adulthood is
best summed up with his own words from his book Confession:
I cannot recall those years without horror,
loathing, and heart-rending pain. I killed people in war, challenged
men to duels with the purpose of killing them, and lost at cards; I
squandered the fruits of the peasants' toil and then had them
executed; I was a fornicator and a cheat. Lying, stealing, promiscuity
of every kind, drunkenness, violence, murder - there was not a crime I
did not commit...Thus I lived for ten years."
Later in life, Tolstoy formulated a unique Christian
philosophy which espoused non-resistance to evil as the proper response
to aggression, and which put great emphasis on fair treatment of the
poor and working class. Tolstoy also gave a strong plea for Christians
to reject the State when seeking answers to questions of morality and
instead to look within themselves and to God for their answers...
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Walter Moss
Excerpt:
This drama occurs in a psychological atmosphere as
real but elusive as a St. Petersburg fog. It is one of raised but then
dashed hopes, of confusion, conflict, and alienation, but also one of
yearning for love and a sense of community. It is one, for example, of a
lonely Dostoevsky in exile discovering the necessity of becoming one
with the common people; of the radical Sophia Perovskaya rejecting the
world of her influential father and going among the workers and peasants
to both teach and radicalize them; of a Leo Tolstoy so miserable that he
contemplates suicide until he also discovers new hope among the
peasants. It is one of the poet and philosopher Vladimir Soloviev,
formerly a teenage nihilist, seeking a vision of Sophia, the oneness of
the universe, in an Egyptian desert. And it is one in which even Tsar
Alexander II seeks refuge from the complexities and conflicts of the
time in the arms of a women younger than most of his children.
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Excerpt:
The Last Days of Leo Tolstoy by Vladimir Chertkov,
Tolstoy's long-time personal secretary, disciple and executor of
his literary estate, is both a history, a chronicle of Tolstoy's
deathbed scene, and a story, a personal interpretation of that event in
a literary genre reminiscent of the Gospels. Chertkov depicts the
dying Tolstoy as a kind of Christ-figure, who, by his renunciation
of all worldly goods, by his ethics of love and by his very death,
saves a suffering humanity. This deification of the great Russian
novelist, who sought salvation in this world, not beyond it, calls
to mind the similar fates of Buddha, Jesus, Confucius and other
heretics. Repudiating, in his last period, all religious institutions,
dogmas and rituals, Tolstoy preached the gospel of a living God within
us all, for which he was excommunicated. Persecuted by state and church
and scorned by his own family, Tolstoy at long last fled the spiritual
conflicts brought on by the aristocratic life on his ancestral Yasnaya
Polyana estate to begin his new life as a simple Russian peasant. He
reached Astapovo, a railroad juncture, where, a few days later, in 1910,
he died at the age of 82. His tremendous vitality, reflective powers,
passion and sense of humor are all evident to the very end in Chertkov's
fascinating account.
Site Maintained by Leo Finegold.
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