Anna Karenina: Television Tie-In Edition - Softcover

This edition, the famous Constance Garnett translation, has been revised throughout by Leonard J. Kent and Nina Berberova.

"Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."  So begins Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy's great modern novel of an adulterous affair set against the backdrop of Moscow and St. Petersburg high society in the later half of the nineteenth century.  A sophisticated woman who is respectably married to a government bureaucrat, Anna begins a passionate, all-consuming involvement with a rich army officer.  Refusing to conduct a discreet affair, she scandalizes society by abandoning both her husband and her young son for Count Vronsky--with tragic consequences.  Running parallel is the story of the courtship and marriage of Konstantin Levin (the melancholy nobleman who is Tolstoy's stand-in) and Princess Kitty Shcherbatsky.  

Levin's spiritual searching and growth reflect the religious ideals that at the time Tolstoy was evolving for himself.  Taken together, the two plots embroider a vast canvas that ultimately encompasses all levels of Russian society.  "Now and then Tolstoy's novel writes its own self, is produced by its matter, but its subject," noted Vladimir Nabokov.  "Anna Karenina is one of the greatest love stories in world literature."  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."  

"Tolstoy is the greatest Russian writer of prose fiction....Tolstoy's prose keeps pace with our pulses, his characters seem to move with the same swing as the people passing under our window while we sit reading his book....No wonder, then, that elderly Russians at their evening tea talk of Tolstoy's characters as of people who really exist, people to whom their friends may be likened, people they see as distinctly as if they had danced with Kitty and Anna at that ball or dined with Oblonsky at his favorite restaurant, as we shall soon be dining with him. Readers call Tolstoy a giant not because other writers are dwarfs but because he remains always of exactly our own stature, exactly keeping pace with us instead of passing by in the distance, as other authors do."

--Vladimir Nabokov