At its simplest, Anna Karenina is a love story. It is a portrait of a
beautiful and intelligent woman whose passionate love for a handsome
officer sweeps aside all other ties - to her marriage and to the network
of relationships and moral values that bind the society around her. The
love affair of Anna and Vronsky is played out alongside the developing
romance of Kitty and Levin, and in the character of Levin, closely based
on Tolstoy himself, the search for happiness takes on a deeper
philosophical significance.
One of the greatest novels ever written, Anna Karenina combines
penetrating psychological insight with an encyclopedic depiction of
Russian life in the 1870s. The novel takes us from high society St
Petersburg to the threshing fields on Levin's estate, with unforgettable
scenes at a Moscow ballroom, the skating rink, a race course, a railway
station. It creates an intricate labyrinth of connections that is
profoundly satisfying, and deeply moving.
Rosamund Bartlett's translation conveys Tolstoy's precision of meaning
and emotional accuracy in an English version that is highly readable and
stylistically faithful. Like her acclaimed biography of Tolstoy, it is
vivid, nuanced, and compelling.