Creating Anna Karenina, Bob Blaisdell
Creating Anna Karenina, Bob Blaisdell
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Creating Anna Karenina
Tolstoy and the Birth of Literature's Most Enigmatic Heroine

Author: Bob Blaisdell, Boris Dralyuk

Narrator: Gemma Dawson

Unabridged: 15 hr 3 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Oasis Audio

Published: 01/26/2021

Includes: Bonus Material Bonus Material Included


Synopsis

The story behind the origins of Anna Karenina and the turbulent life and times of Leo Tolstoy.

Anna Karenina is one of the most nuanced characters in world literature and we return to her, and the novel she propels, again and again. Remarkably, there has not yet been an examination of Leo Tolstoy specifically through the lens of this novel.

Critic and professor Bob Blaisdell unravels Tolstoy’s family, literary, and day-to-day life during the period that he conceived, drafted, abandoned, and revised Anna Karenina. In the process, we see where Tolstoy’s life and his art intersect in obvious and unobvious ways.

Readers often assume that Tolstoy, a nobleman-turned-mystic would write himself into the principled Levin. But in truth, it is within Anna that the consciousness and energy flows with the same depth and complexities as Tolstoy. Her fateful suicide is the road that Tolstoy nearly traveled himself.

At once a nuanced biography and portrait of the last decades of the Russian empire and artful literary examination, Creating Anna Karenina will enthrall the thousands of readers whose lives have become deeper and clearer after experiencing this hallmark of world literature.

About The Author

Bob Blaisdell is Professor of English at the City University of New York’s Kingsborough College. He is a reviewer for the San Francisco Chronicle, the Los Angeles Review of Books, The Christian Science Monitor, and the editor of more than three dozen Dover literature and poetry collections. He lives in New York City.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Janet on May 30, 2021

I thoroughly enjoyed this literary biography of Tolstoy as he wrote his masterpiece, Anna Karenina. Professor Bill Blaisdell admits to a lifelong obsession with Anna Karenina, which he read some twenty times in translation before he learned Russian so as to read it in the original. The obsession war......more

Goodreads review by Julie on September 07, 2020

If I had seen this on the shelf, with its awful soft-focus, historical-chick-lit headless-woman cover, I might not have even picked it up. The subtitle is weird too: Anna Karenina is hardly an "enigmatic heroine." Complex, absolutely, but if any literary character is (in Blaisdell's words) "hyper-co......more

Goodreads review by Laurel on November 22, 2022

A very interesting biography of Tolstoy and his novel. I think Blaisdell shows prejudice against Tolstoy’s wife and for Anna, though, without giving much evidence. Thus I would say, read it, but with a salt shaker in hand.......more

Goodreads review by Derek on February 19, 2023

This was a detailed, well-researched, well-written, and surprisingly original contribution to the literature on Tolstoy. I just loved how deeply the author was able to delve into Tolstoy’s life at the time he was composing one of his two masterpieces, Anna Karenina. But it’s not just that the author......more

Goodreads review by Daniel on March 08, 2021

I simply can't read this anymore. If you're a student of literature, looking to analyse the development of a novel, this is your book. But if you were me, looking for what you hoped would be a unique take on Russian history and culture...all you found was a very irritating and annoying Leo Tolstoy o......more