Description

A glittering affair begins in Russian high society.
Tolstoy follows its consequences through marriage, family and the search for meaning.

Anna is a beautiful, intelligent woman whose passionate affair with the dashing Count Vronsky leads her towards ruin.
Yet Anna Karenina is far more than one of world literature’s great love stories. Twinned with Anna’s story is that of Levin, an awkward idealist whose happy marriage and domestic trials become part of his own search for meaning.
Moving between Moscow, St Petersburg and the Russian countryside, Tolstoy creates a rich social novel about desire, family, morality and spiritual uncertainty. Anna’s defiance of society is set against Levin’s attempts to understand work, faith, marriage and goodness, giving the novel its extraordinary emotional and philosophical range.
Tolstoy’s power lies in the patience with which he follows every contradiction of feeling: tenderness and resentment, duty and longing, self-deception and moral clarity. The result is a Russian literary classic that feels vast in scope yet intimate in every judgement, gesture and private crisis.
TRANSLATED BY LOUISE AND AYLMER MAUDE
VINTAGE CLASSICS RUSSIAN SERIES: sumptuous editions of the greatest books to come out of Russia during the most tumultuous period in its history.

‘One of the greatest love stories in world literature’ Vladimir Nabokov
‘I’ve read and re-read this novel and every time I find another layer in the story’ Philippa Gregory

Publisher Review

"One of the greatest love stories in world literature" -- Vladimir Nabokov "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" -- Jonathan Dimbleby "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" -- Amanda Craig Independent "I've read and re-read this novel and every time I find another layer in the story" -- Philippa Gregory "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" -- Hugh Thomson Independent