Anna Karenina, Bind 1

by Leo Tolstoy, Lev Tolstoj, Marie Tetzlaff (Translator)

495 pages, Hardcover

Published January 1, 2018

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

[Frederik · Rating 3 out of 5]

Man skal altid være i et lidt specielt humør før man giver sig i kast med de store russiske klassikere, og Anna Karenina er absolut ingen undtagelse. Bind 1 af den russiske kærlighedsroman "par excellence" føles faktisk som en naturlig fortsættelse af Krig og Fred (hvilket den rent faktisk også var!) med fokus på vilde familiedramaer, utroskabshåndtering og en samfundskritisk dissekering af det præ-revolutionære Rusland som hovedtemaer. Om den er bedre end forgængeren må være op til Tolstoj-feinschmeckere at vurdere, men at vi har at gøre med et storladent russisk sæbeopera med alt hvad det indebærer, kan alle vist være enige om.