Anna Karenina (Vintage Classic Russians Series)

Name: Anna Karenina (Vintage Classic Russians Series)
Brand: Penguin Random House UK
Availability: InStock
Author: Leo Tolstoy
ISBN: 9781473587588

Author: Leo Tolstoy

Series: Vintage Classic Russians Series

Narrator: Tamaryn Payne

Unabridged: 33 hr 33 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Vintage Digital

Published: 06/25/2020

Categories: Fiction, Classic

Synopsis

Brought to you by Penguin.

TRANSLATED BY LOUISE AND AYLMER MAUDE

Anna is a beautiful, intelligent woman whose passionate affair with the dashing Count Vronsky leads her to ruin. But her story is also about a search for meaning, and by twinning it with that of Levin, an awkward idealist whose happy marriage and domestic trials form the backdrop for a similar quest, Tolstoy creates a rich and complex masterpiece that has captured the imagination of readers for decades.

The Vintage Classic Russians Series: Published for the 100th anniversary of the 1917 Russian Revolution, these are must-have, beautifully designed editions of six epic masterpieces that have survived controversy, censorship and suppression to influence decades of thought and artistic expression.

(P) Penguin Audio 2020

About Leo Tolstoy

Leo Tolstoy was born in 1828 at Yasnaya Polyana in central Russia and educated privately. He studied Oriental languages and law at the University of Kazan, then led a life of dissipation until 1851, when he went to the Caucasus and joined an artillery regiment. He took part in the Crimean War, and on the basis of this experience wrote The Sevastopol Stories, which confirmed his tenuous reputation as a writer.

After a period in St. Petersburg and abroad, where he studied educational methods for use in his school for peasant children at Yasnaya Polyana, Tolstoy married Sofya Behrs in 1862. The next fifteen years was a period of great happiness: the couple had thirteen children, and Tolstoy managed his estates, continued his educational projects, and wrote War and Peace and Anna Karenina.

A Confession marked a spiritual crisis in Tolstoy's life; he became an extreme moralist, and in a series of pamphlets written after 1880, he expressed his rejection of state and church, indictment of the weaknesses of the flesh, and denunciation of private property. He published his last novel, Resurrection, in 1900.

Tolstoy's teaching earned him many followers at home and abroad, but also much opposition, and in 1901 he was excommunicated by the Russian Orthodox Church. He died in 1910.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Jeffrey on September 25, 2020

***Spoiler alert. If you have read this book, please proceed. If you are never going to read this novel (be honest with yourself), then please proceed. If you may read this novel, but it may be decades in the future, then please proceed. Trust me, you are not going to remember, no matter how compell......more

Goodreads review by emma on April 22, 2025

welcome to...ANNA DECEMBERENINA! it's the start of the month (kinda). i've attempted a (reprehensible) pun on a book title (to everyone's chagrin). there is a notoriously long classic on my currently reading (ill-advisedly). you know what that means. IT'S PROJECT LONG CLASSIC TIME, the fan favorite in......more

Goodreads review by Yun on December 01, 2025

I always mean to read more classics. And of course Anna Karenina was high on my list. It's considered by many to be one of the best novels ever written, and on top of which, I've never read anything by Tolstoy. So even though its monstrous size of more than 800 pages was quite intimidating and kept......more

Goodreads review by Terry on June 20, 2008

In the beginning, reading Anna Karenin can feel a little like visiting Paris for the first time. You’ve heard a lot about the place before you go. Much of what you see from the bus you recognize from pictures and movies and books. You can’t help but think of the great writers and artists who have be......more

Goodreads review by Emily May on April 16, 2020

This is a book that I was actually dreading reading for quite some time. It was on a list of books that I'd been working my way through and, after seeing the size of it and the fact that 'War And Peace' was voted #1 book to avoid reading, I was reluctant to ever get started. But am I glad that I did......more

Quotes

One of the greatest love stories in world literature

Tolstoy's historical and human sweep is breathtaking. His vision, humanity and his knowledge that love and pain are at the heart of life is the most important of all the profound truths revealed in this great novel

In Anna Karenina, Tolstoy got totally inside the mind of a woman who is prepared to lose everything for the sake of man and who is so much in love that she commits suicide. I don't like her as a woman, but I think it is a brilliant portrait, unequalled in literature Independent

I've read and re-read this novel and every time I find another layer in the story

I first read Anna Karenina 20 years ago when travelling across the Peruvian desert on a long bus journey, and it has stayed with me ever since Independent

Anyone who has read Anna Karenina will be aware of its extraordinary power as an epic psychological tale of a woman who gives up her husband and son for the sake of an affair with a handsome army officer. It has humour but, as with all of Tolstoy's works, it is completely without sentimentality Mail on Sunday

I just love this classic romance about a married mother who succumbs to an unsuitable lover and becomes pregnant by him, which of course results in all sorts of pressures and heartache. The best love story ever told

Probably one of the greatest novelistic treatments of the torments of love Daily Mail