Anna Karenina (Leo Tolstoy)

I loved War and Peace and hated Anna Karenina. I got within 20 pages of finishing the book and gave up in disgust. It's a 200 page novel that drags on for 800+ pages. The main character is impossible to care about, and the rest of the characters are in some cases only mildly likable. By contrast, the story, historical landscape, and characters of War and Peace held me tight to the last page, and I was sorry it ended. Tolstoy's story-telling technique is similar in both books. He puts you on the ground in the middle of the moment to moment action and lets the outline of the story emerge, much as it would in real life. That worked well for me in War and Peace and failed in Anna Karenina. The structural problem with Anna Karenina is that the story is too small and lurid to be interesting beyond a couple of hundred pages. A lot of the narrative was irrelevant to the main plot, and the rest was like reading some of the more dreary posts on the Craigslist Marriage and Long Ter... Read more

Watch Video Here: http://www.amazon.com/review/R34IR1D2XDGLG0 Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy. Published by MobileReference (mobi).

The translation is excellent. The book is good but overrated (of course, my female friends disagree). I thought it began to drag on after page 500, where the book should of ended (so I removed a star). Overall the book is very much like a soap opera. There is much personal conflict, affairs, jealousy, etc. It is a little slow moving, but very well written (of course).

What a marvelous translation this is! We get a story that is faintly old-fashioned, very slightly foreign--as though your grandmother, born abroad but having lived in the U.S. for years and retaining the merest tinge of an accent, were telling you a long story about family members you've never met--and yet intimate and delightfully gossipy, all at the same time. No wonder it's a beloved classic; this book tells both its sad story and its happy story clearly and with plenty of feeling. Characters grow and change, dismaying situations occur, and all seems very real. Don't miss this fine book.

In 1875, when this novel was first published Tolstoy was forty-seven, already flourishing in his career as a writer. Several deaths in his family including that of a young woman whose relationship to Tolstoy is unclear must have served as his inspiration to this crushing romance. Anna Karenina is a novel about courtship, marriage, and kinship, their jubilation and intricacies. Anna comes into the scene meddling with his brother's marital problem. During her brief visit to Moscow to settle her brother's affair, she meets Kitty and her young and dapper beau Vronsky. Although triumphant in convincing Darya to stay married to her brother Stiva, she is impudent in separating Kitty from Vronsky. After her return to Petersburg she finds herself less and less attached with her husband and more and more enchanted with Vronsky. This novel presents the repercussions of adulterous behavior in 19th century Russian culture. Society condemns Anna and yet exonerates Vronsky as the murderer... Read more

I don't know why everybody thinks this is great literature. If it weren't Tolstoy, everybody would see it for what it is--a soap opera in print. At least the main plot is. I don't know what the point of the subplot with Kitty and Levin is, except to make the book a few hundred pages longer and a lot more boring. Seriously, if you want decent literature with similar characters and stories, go read Jane Austen or Vanity Fair.

This edition contains a distracting number of typos which apparently grow more numerous as the book goes on. Mostly the typos consist of missing letters which change the intended word. It appears to have never been edited.

Anna Karenina. She was an amazing woman. But no less amazing than the other characters in the novel. Tolstoy was a brilliant man and writer. He knows how to blend plot and thought like few others. After reading his novels, I am convinced that he was a keen observer of human nature and interactions. I believe he must have spent hours reflecting on why people act in the way they do. And the result, clear and penetrating novels on the human experience. I highly recommend this novel. I feel enriched for having read something so well written. Just the way that Tolstoy mixes words leaves me with a feeling of awe. This novel is much more direct than War and Peace. He left his characters out of his writing in War and Peace, while he digressed about other topics. In this novel, digression sometimes happens in his dealings with Levin, but not as frequently as in War and Peace. The novel is great, the plot is fantastic. I see similarities to War and Peace everywhere. Natasha and... Read more

This superb novel presents readers with Anna Karenina, the trapped and bored wife of a Russian gentleman who, despite her staid and comfortable life, chooses to toss everything out the window in pursuit of a foppish count. Modern readers may admire her spunk and independence, but in Tolstoy's world, shallow behavior brings consequences, not least in the eyes of high society. Tolstoy also sketches a vivid portrait of nineteenth-century Russia, which is expertly conveyed by translators Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky; many times during the novel I almost felt I'd walked straight into the scenery. The author does a splendid job of exploring the vicissitudes of landowner culture, too, but by no means does he dwell on related polemics. Tolstoy's a lot like Levin, the somewhat autobiographical character: more interested in hunting with his bird dog than in dealing with the more disappointing and materialist world of people. One of my favorite passages entails Tolstoy's elaborate d... Read more

I have read all of Tolstoy's works and though I love them all, Anna Karenina is my most treasured. I have read this book atleast a dozen times and never get tired of reading it. I love how high society is always portrayed in Tolstoy's works as "naughty" (wink). But mostly I fall in love with the tragic heroine, torn between the love of her only son and her adulterous lover. Her affair in the end consumes her, and Anna's life takes a tragic turn. A story that stands up to the test of time.

This book was in excellent condition and the price was unbeatable given that the book was practically brand new.

Many themes of Anna Karenina are timeless: marriage, infidelity, the roles of men and women, personal fulfillment, honor, spirituality, and naturalism. If that isn't enough, then Tolstoy offers an 18th-century look at Russian society and culture, still well before the run-up to the revolution. Don't look to Tolstoy for enlightened feminism, although one of the characters argues for education and equality for women, and one of the minor threads relates to the status of peasants. Tolstoy is not especially subtle in portraying his characters, full of emotion and conflict. Nobody is idealized, yet all still prompt some sympathy. The main characters are so richly drawn. Anna's decline was inevitable, but it's the loss of someone far from pure evil, with her significant talents and deep capacity for love. Read Brothers Karamazov and Anna K at around the same time, as I did, and you'll get an excellent opportunity to compare two of the greatest Russian novelists head-to-head. Two thou... Read more

I'm probably one of the very few people who read this classic without having a clue as to the ending (no, never saw the movie--still haven't) ... so it was a genuine surprise and it rocked me. The opening line is a killer ... nothing else like it in all of literature. Although I prefer Dostoevsky to Tolstoy, this is a genuine masterpiece.

It's really hard to understand sometimes! Anna Karenina is the famous Tolstoy tale of a wife who has an affair. At first, I wanted to quit it was such a difficult read, but once I got through it, I loved it. I have to say, I thought Kitty and Levin's relationship was really cute, especially when they finally kissed! I was super-sad when Anna killed herself, it just sucked that was so sorrowful that she felt the need to die. I didn't really like Vronsky, he seemed sort of like a jerk who just lost interest in Anna, after she left her husband and son for him. I like the parallels between Anna and Levin. Sometimes, it did get a little boring, like when Levin worked with some peasants in a field, it took like, a huge portion of the book to explain about the field-work. Also, I got a little confused when Levin started to believe in God. All in all, a good read, not for those who get bored easily, though.

Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy Oprah's Book Club: 'Anna Karenina' by Russian Victorian author Count Leo Tolsoty.