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| Anna Karenina (Penguin Classics) | 
 enlarge | Author: Leo Tolstoy
Creators: Richard Pevear, Larissa Volokhonsky
Publisher: Penguin Classics
Category: Book
List Price: £8.99
Buy Used: £2.48
You Save: £6.51 (72%)
New (34) Collectible (1) from £3.34
Avg. Customer Rating:  19 reviews
Sales Rank: 4727
Media: Paperback
Edition: Revised edition
Pages: 864
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.2
Dimensions (in): 7.7 x 5 x 1.6
ISBN: 0140449175
Dewey Decimal Number: 813
EAN: 9780140449174
ASIN: 0140449175
Publication Date: January 30, 2003
Availability: Usually dispatched within 1-2 business days
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| Customer Reviews:
 Unhappy families January 13, 2008
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
"Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." That line opens and sets the tone of "Anna Karenina," a tangled and tragic tale of nineteenth century Russia. Tolstoy's story of lovers and family is interlaced with razor-sharp social commentary and odd moments that are almost transcendent. In other words, this is a masterpiece.
When Stepan Oblonsky has an affair with the governess, his wife says that she's leaving him, and now the family is about to disintegrate. Stepan's sister Anna arrives to smooth over their marital problems, and consoles his wife Dolly until she agrees to stay. But on the train there, she met the outspoken Countess Vronsky, and the countess's dashing son, who is semi-engaged to Dolly's sister Kitty.
Anna and Vronsky start to fall in love -- despite the fact that Anna has been married for ten years, to a wealthy husband she doesn't care about, and has a young son. Even so, Anna rejects her loveless marriage and becomes the center of scandal and public hypocrisy, and even becomes pregnany by Vronsky. As she prepares to jump ship and get a divorce, Anna becomes a victim of her own passions...
That isn't the entire story, actually -- Tolstoy weaves in other plots, about disintegrating families, new marriages, and the melancholy Levin's constant search for God, truth, and goodness. Despite the grim storyline about adultery, and the social commentary, there's an almost transcendent quality to some of Tolstoy's writing. It's the most optimistic tragic book I've ever read.
For some reason, Tolstoy called this his "first novel," even though he had already written some before that. Perhaps it's because "Anna Karenina" tackles so many questions and themes, and does so without ever dropping the ball. No wonder it's so long and imposing -- Tolstoy covered a lot of ground in here.
And while "Anna Karenina" was not the first book he wrote, it is probably the deepest and most moving. Tolstoy steeps the book in social commentary, and his personal philosophies. It's also one of those books that takes a very long time to move itself forward -- Tolstoy's writing is slow and ponderous, with a lot of serious discussion about religion and relationships. But his intense, slightly rough writing is worth it.
In some tragic books, you get the feeling that the author really despises his characters, and doesn't really care what happens to them. Tolstoy never gives you that feeling -- no matter how annoying his characters are, they always have something interesting or endearing. No caricatures at all -- even Anna's irritating, arrogant brother is given some quirks to make him seem real.
Oddly enough, the most moving character here is not Anna, but Konstantin Levin -- the tortured, passionate landowner is so earnest that it's difficult not to care about him. Apparently he was Tolstoy's alter ego, which explains his depth. But Anna and Vronsky are strong leads, a passionate pair who are both selfish and seductive, but never boring.
A beautiful look at living right vs. living wrong, "Anna Karenina" is a truly magnificent book. This book is undoubtedly Tolstoy's opus, and a stunning look at human nature.
 NINETEENTH CENTURY DI November 2, 2007
0 out of 4 found this review helpful
P&V's translation is really beyond praise: delicate, scrupulous, and rendered in English as smoothly propulsive as diving into a warm lap pool. Clearly, the problem is Tolstoy. In early drafts, he started out very judgmental against Anna, but flooded the final text with enough nuance that the reader makes his own decision, and mine is that she was another Princess Di: willful, spiteful, manipulative, humorless. We've all wanted to hurt those who reject us, but committing suicide to hurt Vronsky, who sacrificed his life loving her every day, is contemptible, so I had no sympathy for her. I did, however, sympathize with her husband, who had to clean up her childish mess, yet what Tolstoy did to him is also contemptible. He turns him into a religious prig in a way that completely contradicts foregoing character development. This is Tolstoy at his old puppet-master tricks, tricks that keep you from caring about any of his characters. Despite some masterful passages (like Dolly's monologue on her way to see Anna, going back and forth on whether to accept or condemn what Anna did, and relating those conflicts to her own womanhood), this long work, though impeccably written, never really pulls at your heart.
Sense of Self October 19, 2007
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
"Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way"
- Leo Tolstoy "Anna Karenina"
Anna Karenina is a beautifully written novel about three families: the Oblonskys, the Levins, and the Karenins. The first line (one of the most famous in literature) hints at Tolstoy's own views about happy and unhappy marriages having these same three families also represent three very different societal and physical locations in Russia in addition to distinctly different views on love, loyalty, fidelity, happiness and marital bliss.
Tolstoy seems to stress that `trusting companionships" are more durable and filled with happiness versus "romantic passion" that bursts with flames and then slowly; leaves ashes rather than a firm, solid foundation to build upon.
It is like reading a soap opera with all of its twists and turns where the observer is allowed to enter into the homes, the minds and the spirits of its main characters. The moral compass in the book belongs to Levin whose life and courtship of Kitty mirrors much of Leo Tolstoy's own courtship of his wife Sophia. Levin's personality and spiritual quest is Tolstoy's veiled attempt at bringing to life his own spiritual peaks and valleys and the self doubts that plagued him his entire life despite his happy family life and the fact that he too found love in his life and a committed durable marriage. At the other end of the spectrum is Anna, who also because of her individual choices and circumstances, falls into despair.
It is clear that Tolstoy wants the reader to come away with many messages about the sanctity of marriage, love and family life. He also wants us to be mindful of the choices that we make in life and the affect that these choices have upon ourselves, our station and path in life as well as the affect upon those that we profess to love. Tolstoy also wants us to examine what makes our lives happy or not; and what is at the root of either end result. Levin and Kitty are the happiest married couple; yet Levin faces his own double bind when struggling against domestic bliss and his need for independence on the other hand and how to achieve both (if that is possible) without relinquishing that which made him who he was born to be.
Anna Karenina and Konstantin Levin are the primary protagonists in the novel and both are rich and fine characters in their own right. Both of them focus on self; one however finds the self to be a nurturer which puts value into life very much as a farmer; while the other views self with despair and as a punisher or destroyer. Both views, diametrically opposed, force the characters on very different paths and lives for themselves. Then there is the dilemma of forgiveness versus vengeance. The very epigram for the novel from Romans states: "Vengeance is mine; I will repay." Yet vengeance upon oneself or others is not up to individuals but God; and yet the characters are haunted about what forgiveness is or isn't and by the hollowness of words versus heartfelt and soulfully reflective actions. The themes of social change in Russia, family life's blessings and virtues and farming (even if it is simply the goodness one puts into life and how one cultivates it and others) dominate the novel's landscape. Trains also play a symbolic importance in the novel and it is odd that Tolstoy himself years after writing Anna Karenina dies himself in a train station after setting off from his home in an emotional cloud.
Sometimes the names of the characters themselves can be confusing: so a hint to the reader might be to think of each Russian character's name as having three parts: the first name (examples here are for Levin and Kitty) like Konstantin or Ekaterina, a patronymic which is the father's first name accompanied by a suffix which means son of or daughter of like Dmitrich (son of Dmitri) or Alexandrovna (daughter of Alexander) and then the surname like Levin or Shcherbatskaya. Thus the explanations for the Ekaterina Alexandrovna Shcherbatskaya (nicknamed Kitty) and Konstantin Dmitrich Levin (Levin).
I loved the book and its details and the richness of the characterizations as well as the storytelling technique of the great Tolstoy and I have to agree with Tolstoy when he stated, "I am very proud of its architecture-its vaults are joined so that one cannot even notice where the keystone is. " The vaults: "Anna and Levin" are joined with the very first line of the novel and with their focus on themselves.
Rating: A
Bentley/2007
Stays with you July 5, 2007
4 out of 5 found this review helpful
I admit it - I had a hard time getting through this. The descriptions of Levin's adventures cutting grass and shooting birds, in which Levin's dog gets quite considerable page-time (a rare case of an overdeveloped character), did my head in. It's 800 pages, and a long 800 pages at that. But that doesn't stop Anna Karenina from being a fabulous novel.
This is realism stretched to its limits - surely the richest, most ambitious example of the style. Tolstoy captures the everyday reality of family life in timeless scenes that come to life as vividly today as 130 years ago. You'll find yourself thinking: "Yes! That's what it's like when a relative dies." "Yes! That's how I feel in a room with a social group I'm not part of." Or if you don't, you'll remember the scenes afterwards, when real life reminds you of them.
The Pevear and Volokhonsky translation is excellent. They've done brilliant work with Dostoevsky and it's great to see them give Tolstoy the same treatment: no-nonsense translation, preserving the author's idiosyncrasies in modern English and excising the rubbish inserted by earlier translators. I read an old translation of War and Peace and found it turgid, but this edition of Anna Karenina is lucid and fresh; it could've been written this year.
A great love story December 19, 2006
7 out of 8 found this review helpful
This remarkable story by one of the few mega-novelists of all times is an ageless story that is more real than fiction. I decided to read a copy of this book on my way to vacation last the summer and ended up spending most of my first week being glued to the book. Though it is a Russian story of a century and a half ago, its essence still resonates today.
Anna who is married to the wealthy and older Karenin lives a life of comfort without any excitement, a life that is full of routines and no zest. It is a life she had become used to until she meets the elegant Vronsky and falls in love. Now she must pay the price of adultery or seek marital stability and forgo the echoes of her heart, a soul searching trial that destabilizes the life of her family and that of her lover. In essence she abandons the meaning for her life and pursues the zest of life.
On the other hand is Levine who is in search of the meaning of life and abandons the zest of life for a purposeful life that includes a family, ideas on the advancement of humanism, being at peace with ones world and hard work in is farm and being at peace with God.
In a way, both Levine and Anna can not be blamed for opting considering one choice above the other. They all wanted happiness without having evil intentions and found a balance between the zest of life and the search of its meaning in their own different ways, hurting and find love in the process and in the end, enriching and destroying themselves in their different ways. A highly recommended read and the most insightful love story I have ever read.UNION MOUJIK,DR ZHIVAGO, EUGENE ONEGIN are some of the other books set in Russia that I enjoyed alongside ANNA KARENINA.
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