Anna Karenina Translated by Constance Garnett; Illustrated by Fritz Eichenberg

by Leo Tolstoy

Genres: Classics

Hardcover

Published January 1, 1948

About the author

Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy (Russian: Лев Николаевич Толстой; most appropriately used Liev Tolstoy; commonly Leo Tolstoy in Anglophone countries) was a Russian writer who primarily wrote novels and short stories. Later in life, he also wrote plays and essays. His two most famous works, the novels War and Peace and Anna Karenina, are acknowledged as two of the greatest novels of all time and a pinnacle of realist fiction. Many consider Tolstoy to have been one of the world's greatest novelists. Tolstoy is equally known for his complicated and paradoxical persona and for his extreme moralistic and ascetic views, which he adopted after a moral crisis and spiritual awakening in the 1870s, after which he also became noted as a moral thinker and social reformer.

His literal interpretation of the ethical teachings of Jesus, centering on the Sermon on the Mount, caused him in later life to become a fervent Christian anarchist and anarcho-pacifist. His ideas on nonviolent resistance, expressed in such works as The Kingdom of God Is Within You, were to have a profound impact on such pivotal twentieth-century figures as Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr.

Reviews

[Cheryl Workman · Rating 5 out of 5]

Not my typical story but this was so well written I may be ruined for modern authors. Tolstoy gives dimension and reality to every thought and conversation in a way that I have never seen before. Glad I spent the time to read all 923 pages even when the storyline was not of my personal preference. So worth it.

[Catie · Rating 3 out of 5]

I did it. I read my first Russian novel. It was a real struggle. The last several chapters were really good and there is plenty more good in-between, but this book was a chore. Perhaps a different translation would have been better.

[Space Orlando · Rating 5 out of 5]

Amazing novel, definitely worth the 900 pages and time. Between 1874 and 2025, we find that even in high society and low society, women are more often than not, treated the same way as back in 1874.