Anna Karenina

About this book

Anna Karenina is the story of a married aristocrat/socialite and her affair with the affluent Count Vronsky. The story opens when she arrives in the midst of a family broken up by her brothers unbridled womanizing. A bachelor Vronsky is eager to marry her if she will agree to leave her husband Karenin a senior government official but she is vulnerable to the pressures of Russian social norms the moral laws of the Russian Orthodox Church her own insecurities and Karenins indecision. Widely regarded as a pinnacle in realist fiction Anna Karenina recounts St. Petersburg aristocrat Anna Kareninas life story at the backdrop of the late-19th-century feudal Russian society. Having considered War and Peace not a novel Tolstoy considered Anna Karenina his first true novel. Fyodor Dostoyevsky declared it "flawless as a work of art." His opinion was shared by Vladimir Nabokov who especially admired "the flawless magic of Tolstoys style " and by William Faulkner who described the novel as "the best ever written."