Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy is the best in its class – I am a novelist, but for my money the writers of the19th century set the bar for the whole genre. The reason I love it isn’t so much the tragic Anna with ghastly Vronsky, but because of Princess Kitty and Levin. He’s cracked and she’s a bit cosy, but their love affair is just so transportingly romantic. The description of when they meet at the frozen pond, where she is skating and he can’t even look at her because he feels it would be like looking at the sun, gets me every time. It’s because of these two lovers that I’ve never understood the fuss about Jane Austen’s Elizabeth and Mr Darcy.
ANNA KARENINA, the ORIGINAL 1901 English translation by Constance Garnett and written by Russian writer Leo Tolstoy (1828 - 1910) is considered as one of the greatest novels ever written and Tolstoys first true novel. It is divided into eight parts and was initially published between the years 1873 to 1878 in a publication called The Russian Messenger as serial installments. The main character Anna is married into Russian aristocrat and later has a love affair with a handsome military officer Count Vronsky. Some major themes include marriage, fidelity, passion and jealousy set in nineteenth century Russian high society.This digital edition is beautifully formatted with an active Table of Contents that goes directly to each chapter and all eight parts of the story. Mermaids Classics, an imprint of Mermaids Publishing brings the very best of old book classics to a modern era of digital reading by producing high quality books in ebook format.
Leo Tolstoy was born in 1828 at Yasnaya Polyana, province of Tula, the fourth son of Count Nikolay Tolstoy. Between 1856 and 1861 Tolstoy wrote and traveled abroad extensively. He returned with a sense of revulsion for what he considered to be European materialism. In 1859 he started several schools for peasant children at Yasnaya and in 1862 he founded a magazine in which he contended that it was the peasants who should teach the intellectuals, rather than the other way round. Tolstoy's increasingly radical political stance at the end of his life alienated his wife. He frequently dispensed huge sums of money to beggars and drew up a will relinquishing his copyrights. Such behavior led to frequent disputes with his Sofia. Finding it impossible to continue living a comfortable life with his family whilst preaching communism, he left Yasnaya in 1910, with one of his daughters and his doctor, for an unknown destination. He died on the journey and was buried in a simple peasant's grave.
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