Customer Reviews

Anna Karenina (Penguin Classics)

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Tolstoy was a "giant, striding through the world with his eyes wide open and his nostrils flaring." He didn't miss much. After reading this and his other great work, War and Peace, I was pretty much dumbfounded by his accomplishment. To me, one halmark of true art, whether it be the Sistine Chapel, Beethoven's ninth, King Lear, Paradise Lost, Faust, etc. is how they are even conceived, much less carried off. I am in awe of very few authors, but Tolstoy has to rank as one of the true big leaguers, and this novel captures him at the height of his powers, when he was throwing about a hundred miles an hour, plus. No one could hit him, not even Dostoevsky, and certainly not Turgenev. I think he does an even better job than Flaubert (another of my heroes) at portraying a woman as his central character. I can't speak from experience, obviously, but both Emma and Anna come across as realistically fleshed-out, multi-dimensional figures. I probably lean towards Anna because she is a much more sympathetic character than Emma Bovary. She is an aristocrat in the true sense of the word, not just born into a noble family, but possessing a nobility of spirit as well. Unlike Emma, she loves her child. Her husband, Karenin, is dry and humorlessly ascerbic, with the soul of a civil servant. He uses the child as a pawn to get back at Anna. Vronsky, in contrast, is dashing and clever and looks great in his uniform. In short,Anna is doomed as soon as she meets him. Fate (of the ancient Greek variety) wends its way through the novel, dragging her inexorably to her doom. There are so many vivid scenes throughout, but the most memorable to me is the scene in which Vronsky's racehorse breaks down, foreshadowing the conclusion at the train station. The subplot involving Levin and Kitty does not detract from the main plot, as it might in the hands of a lesser novelist. It is undeniably less dramatic, but serves as a counterpoint precisely because it is more prosaic. Levin is saved by love, Anna destroyed by it. I really don't believe in re-reading books. I'm usually disappointed when I return to them after a prolonged interval. For instance, I just can't bring myself to read War and Peace again. It would be like returning to an earlier affair. I'd be afraid my response wouldn't be as rich as it was at first encounter. But Anna is different. I've read it three times and haven't tired of it in the least. I really couldn't praise a work of art more highly.

In 2004 CRW released an abridged version of Anna Karenina in the Collector's library -a collection of very small well-made hardbacks. Most of their offerings in the collection are unabridged but there was the occasional title which would seem to be too large for the small 4x6 format. At some point they decided to go ahead and publish longer works uncut and nice fat little volumes of some of Dickens' novels appeared. Later an entire Don Quixote appeared but with a smaller print than other books in the collection.

This year (2010), to my delight, they decided to re-release Anna Karenina unabridged in honor of the 100th anniversary of Tolstoy's death. It's a nice thick little volume. I am happy they decided to go with the standard sized print.

The translation is the Maude. If you're going to buy the Maude and not a newer translation, this is THE edition to get. It has a cloth cover, ribbon marker, gilded page edges and a sturdy sewn binding. It's a very well made book that is smaller than the cheapo paperbacks. I was contemplating buying an Everyman's Library edition until I learned they were coming out with it in this collection.

Small is definitely beautiful.

Isn't it funny how the second part of that statement completely changes the meaning of the first? And that is the way the entire book reads. As soon as you think you have a handle on any of the characters, you learn something new that changes everything. The result is that it's almost impossible to make a judgment about anyone.

Anna, in particular, becomes more tragic just for that reason. First we see her as the dutiful, virtuous wife of a passionless man. Then we see her easily corrupted by the decadent Vronsky. How "good" was she in the first place if she was such a willing victim? And even though we see in painful detail why she continuously refuses to do the right thing until it's too late, we still find ourselves asking why.

Who is avenging themselves on whom, and why? Some of the answers are obvious, but some are unexpected and make the most righteous characters downright malicious, and the most unsympathetic almost pathetic.

This is such a fantastic book, and I hope people are not misled by the last review. Apart from many factual innaccuracies (Levin and Anna do meet, this is crucial; and Anna and Vronsky can never marry, this is the root of the crisis, etc.), there are too many generalisations placed on Tolstoy's aims.

Tolstoy weaves a complicated story, not just a love story but one with great comedy, and deep philosophical issues. We share Tolstoy's own indecisive worries about death, love, politics, and laugh at the faults we see in ourselves and aquaintances. Levin, as a reflection of Tolstoy (Leo's wife once told him, "you are Levin plus talent, and Levin is an intolerable man"), guides us through most of these issues, but never tells us what to think. We are observers and make our own decisions.

This book makes you laugh out loud, cry in pain, and think hard aside from being a compulsive story and a beautiful picture of Tolstoy's Russia.

What could be better than a beautiful young woman torn by love and responsibility? Nothing, as shown in Leo Tolstoy's captivating romance, Anna Karenina. The reader is whirled into the novel by the maelstrom of a story of lust, infidelity, high society, and politics during 1870's Russia. The character will glide through different emotions - from supporting Anna's relationship with the handsome Vronsky to sympathizing with her cold husband, Alexei Karenin, to finally concluding that Konstantine Levin is the only decent character in the whole book. (It is interesting to note that Tolstoy compared himself to Levin!) Read this and be drowned in an utterly unforgettable tale.

I think that everybody goes through a stage in their lives, something close to a personal renaissance or an emotional birth. I went through that during the second year of my engineering program. I must say that this book definitely started it all.

I merely picked it up because the cover was so intriguing (the picture of the lady cried out to me). The story is very descriptive (I think that is how Tolstoy writes), very absorbing and very sad. I have never read a book of this caliber. The characters in the book are real and you feel like you can hold on to them. I would definitely recommend this to someone seeking for a deep emotional read.

Anna Karenin, I believe, was the novel that started the divorce genre. It is one of the greatest tragedies ever written in the 19th century, possibly the best book ever produced. I know there are many readers out there, who shy away from reading long books, and yes, Leo Tolstoy's text can be challenging at times for the unlearned reader, but the story is so worth it. In the first chapter the reader is immediately given a conflict, a family dishevel spawned by Oblonsky's affair with the household's governess, and from there is taken into another fiasco caused by Anna Kerenin's affair with a young military officer, Count Vronsky, that can only end in ruin. In those times, there was no Jerry Springer show or the practice of divorce as a science, so the populace was always in constant abhorrence of elopement between husband and wife. When I read the book, I immediately felt sorry for Anna, a young woman played cruelly into loving another heartthrob by unwanted advances, then corrupted in the process. A hundred fifty years ago, a wife was thought of as property, not an individual who may have had similar interests and aspirations in life as the man. They never lived away from family and were regarded in society exclusively as baby bearers. It is depressing to see how horrible females were treated in Russia during those times and the book stands as a testimonial to how far women have come since its publication. Being an impatient reader myself, it is hard for me to read through big books without putting an interesting face to a character. Sam Neill (Dr. Graham, from Jurassic Park) was an inseparable caparison to Mr. Karenin, the official husband of Anna Karenin. To see Sam Neill in the character was like seeing a perfectly done movie with characters matched for the part. It was hard not to see a young Terri Hatcher (Louis Lane, Louis and Clark the New Adventures of Superman) in Anna, or Keanu Reeves (Police Officer Jack Tavern, Speed) in Count Vronsky. One of my favorite characters in this book is Levin, a Richard Chamberlain of the 19th century (for those who don't know of the actor Richard Chamberlain he played a stunning performance as the red bearded John Blackthorne in James Clavell's Shogun mini-series). Levin's character holds vitality, strength, and love for the untamed land. Even though he is a man of high propriety, he enjoys working with the peasants. There is a remarkable part in the book that details Levin's cooperation with his servants in threshing hay for the harvest. The character was based on Leo Tolstoy's own traits and desires to live a simpler life away from the hustle and bustle of society.

If you have recently been through a divorce or are going through a troublesome marriage, I encourage you to read this book. It should never be substituted for the Holy Bible, but kept just as a reminder to how insignificant your problems may have seemed to your great great great grandmothers.

War and Peace and Anna Karenina are Leo Tolstoy's most important works, and Tolstoy is the greatest of novelists. However, a significant number of user reviews on Amazon.co.uk (not Amazon.com, which is interesting!) show that Anna Karenina is not for everyone. Reviewers who have understood well what Tolstoy was saying and why have nevertheless found the novel too long, and have not enjoyed sections that Tolstoy would have considered essential.

Yes, it's a long and "difficult" novel. Its central story of an attractive married woman who leaves her husband and son for a dashing cavalry officer, ultimately coming to a bad end, is well-known. But there is vastly more to it than that. Against a detailed background of events and social issues in mid 1870's Russia, Tolstoy explores a spectrum of ways in which families are unhappy. He is much concerned with the moral and spiritual state of his characters. Some, including Anna, her lover and her brother, are totally lost, and they, aided by external factors, bring great unhappiness to themselves and others. Some have found a spiritual home, providing Tolstoy with the opportunity to explore several, but we are left thinking that what they have found may be no more than self-satisfaction, if that. Levin, who marries into the same family as Anna's brother, but is a very different type of person, is modeled on Tolstoy himself, and he spends most of the novel on a spiritual quest. In the concluding chapters he finds a tentative answer, though we suspect that, as with Tolstoy, it will prove to be only a staging-post on the longer journey.

Levin is also given Tolstoy's experience of courtship, early marriage and first fatherhood, and there is much about the contemporary agricultural scene (an exciting time, as new methods and machines were introduced), some politics, a couple of game shoots, an enlightened discussion of the case for the emancipation and education of women and peasants, the provision of medical care for the peasantry, and an examination of the misery caused by the Russian church's rules on divorce.

Many of the issues discussed are still current today, making the novel seem in some respects rather modern. Perhaps the debate about the benefits to society as a whole of enabling and encouraging the less-favored to better themselves and their families is eternal. The considerations offered by Anna's husband against infidelity within marriage - what society thinks; religion; hurt to near relatives; and hurt to self - also have a timeless quality.

Buy and read Anna Karenina if the web into which Anna's story is woven appeals to you. Give it the time it needs and you will find you have made an investment for life. If the 850 closely-printed pages and all the detail about Tolstoy's preoccupations and the social and other issues of the Russia of his time are just too daunting, you may prefer the similarly tragic but more accessible heroine of Thomas Hardy's Tess of the D'Urbervilles. If, of course, you have already read and enjoyed both Tess and War and Peace (and perhaps also Flaubert's Madame Bovary), you won't be troubling to read this review, you will be raring to get on with Anna Karenina.

I received a different translation of this on loan from a friend a short while ago (the David Magarshack translation). I took it with me on a short trip to London (yay!) where I got to see Ewan McGregor in Guys and Dolls (which is neither here nor there but I'm still excited about it). I figured a big long book would be appropriate for a big long airplane ride. And really it probably was the best choice for where to begin this book because while it managed to hold my attention while I was reading it, there was nothing about it that compelled me to pick it up when I was not.

After about 150 pages I felt unhappy with that translation. It felt like I was missing things. So in London I bought another edition of it and finished up by reading this. I wasn't entirely happy with this translation either)... I think this is my first Russian book, so maybe Russian has too complex of a structure to translate well? Because I haven't had this feeling with, say, French translated classics.

Ultimately, I wasn't very drawn in to the love stories, or the philosophical agonies, and while I partly identified with Levin's crisis of faith I thought it was interesting that the book ended by talking about that which seemed to give it extra significance, as if to imply that was the most important aspect of the novel.

I would be interested in hearing a bit of a critical analysis of this book to get at different layers of it but I don't think I will ever read it again, unless many many years down the road when I have forgotten what it was about.

One particular note about this translation:

I wondered while I was reading this why they called it Anna Karenin and not Anna Karenina as it seems to be called everywhere else. Recently I've been doing a lot of research on Russia for a novel I'm writing and now I wonder even more. Apparently in the Russian language the last names are different based on gender. So her husband would be Mr. Karenin, she would be Mrs. Karenina. If you call her Anna Karenin you are calling her Mr. Anna Karenin. It's not the female form. I can't imagine why the translator would feel like she needed to translate a character's last name to an anglicized form. I think we could all deal with it being slightly different from her husband's. Ms. Edmonds didn't feel the need to anglicize the first names of anyone and if she had that would also have been in poor taste. It was a bad choice, in my opinion.

I found this book slightly dissapointing after reading "War and Peace". If I had read this first, I might be saying it's the greatest thing ever, but I just didn't think it had the same energy and life that "War and Peace" had. Tolstoy seemed to go through agony writing the book and it shows. The problem is the characters just don't come to life as much. Anna and Vronsky are just too shallow to be truly tragic. Anna comes close at the end with her utterly despairing observations on life just before her suicide, but that was too little too late. And Levin and Kitty are likable but I thought the Pierre-Natasha love story was much better. Levin is a little too stiff--Pierre is Bill Clinton and Levin is Al Gore.

I think heroic epics and Religious tracts were more in Tolstoy's nature. Tragedy was not. I know Tolstoy suffered from depression and had a dark side, but I don't think he had a tragic view of the world overall and he seems to be straining here. Every great writer has to write a tragedy to be considered truly great. I wonder if he subconsciously wrote this as an assignment to be considered a Literary God.

Maybe this is unfair. It's clearly a work of genius but it just didn't personally move me as much as that other BIG Tolstoy book.
But still worth reading for any serious fan of literature.