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Anna Karenina (Barnes & Noble Classics) |  | Author: Leo Tolstoy
Creators: Constance Garnett, Amy Mandelker
Publisher: Barnes & Noble Classics
Category: Book
Buy New: $9.99
as of 11/27/2009 20:30 CST details
New (5) Used (20) from $3.34
Seller: Hallway Books
Rating:  11 reviews
Sales Rank: 179306
Media: Hardcover
Pages: 832
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 2.3
Dimensions (in): 8.6 x 6.2 x 2.5
ISBN: 1593081774
Dewey Decimal Number: 891.733
EAN: 9781593081775
ASIN: 1593081774
Publication Date: August 26, 2004
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
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Set against this tragic affair is the story of Konstantin Levin, a melancholy landowner whom Tolstoy based largely on himself. While Anna looks for happiness through love, Levin embarks on his own search for spiritual fulfillment through marriage, family, and hard work. Surrounding these two central plot threads are dozens of characters whom Tolstoy seamlessly weaves together, creating a breathtaking tapestry of nineteenth-century Russian society.
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| Customer Reviews:
Showing reviews 1-5 of 11
 What did I expect? September 12, 2009
Karol D. Trujillo (NV)
I love a good story that's a thousand pages, but I really expected much more out of this book. Because it was a Tolstoy, I thought it would be an automatic great read. Anna was sooo frustrating, caught up with her beauty and always needing reassurance of that beauty got old. Also her self destructing mind and determination to be unhappy, drove me nuts. Vronsky and Anna set themselves up into a no win situation - together but not accepted by society, at least the woman wasn't. As usual, in those times, the man gets a free pass. I had a real problem with Kitty and her shallowness and found it really hard to believe that after months of feeling sorry for herself because Anna stole Vronsky, she suddenly was supposed to love the paranoid what's his name. He wasn't good enough before but now she is the perfect wife to him? I would rather he had found a nice peasant girl to marry. The Russian social world was fun to tap into, after tons of British and Chinese books, but as a whole, I thought the characters were unlikeable.
 Effort Unrewarded July 5, 2009
Andrew Desmond (Neutral Bay, NSW Australia)
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
I struggled with this book. I had expectations of the greatest novel ever written. What I got was a laboriously worded love story with shallow characters that tested my patience to the limit. This is far from the pinnacle of novels. I am well aware that in expressing my views, I am in the minority. I am yet to find a fellow traveller.
No one can say I didn't give it my best shot. I worked my way through some 800 plus pages but, at the end, wondered why I made the effort. It was no easy going. The plot is convoluted and the characters encourage little empathy or interest. Whatever was Anna's end was of no interest. Indeed, the only portion of the whole book that managed to gain firm hold of my attention was a digression into grass being cut with scythes about a quarter of the way through the book. If this was its highlight for me, the book is simply not working.
I shan't provide a synopsis of the events with the novel. This would take a short story in its own right. My advice is not to attempt this book. The rewards are small and the effort is herculean.
Great late night read... rather, many nights May 18, 2009
George
Absolutely great read. Dark and light at the same time, with wonderful historical precursors and lots of material to think on.
Two different books! September 11, 2008
K. A. Kegley (Little Elm, TX United States)
Anna Karenina is the classic tale of a married 18th-century Russian woman who falls in love with another man, leaves her husband and child for him, then has to face the consequences of those actions. This was my first Tolstoy to finish (been reading War & Peace on and off for a little while now, but am not even close to finishing) and even though the English translation was choppy, I liked the basic story and admire Tolstoy's determination to write about a subject so controversial at that time and so far removed from his own life, in that he's trying to tell what is very much a uniquely woman's story (a married person falling in love with someone else is not unique to women, of course, but the consequences are certainly different, particularly in the era in which Tolstoy is writing).
I enjoyed this book and it held my attention throughout, but it has some major flaws, the main one being that it's like flipping back and forth between two entirely different novels. One is the story of Anna and her torment over her love for Kostya; the other is the story of Lev, a familial connection of Anna's who spends many, many pages giving us every detail of his conflicting emotions over various philosophical, political and sociological points, none of which have anything whatsoever to do with Anna's story. How are these two plot points related? Good question! I see NO real connection between Lev and Anna's stories besides the very thin one of their being related by marriage. Supposedly, the character of Lev is based largely on Tolstoy himself, and if so, he should have saved it for his autobiography and not used Anna's story as a platform for his personal ramblings. It's not that Lev's story wasn't interesting. It was just a different book.
The parts that did relate to exploring the actions and emotions of Anna, her husband and her lover were fairly well done. Aside from the fact that there was too much of Lev's story and it detracted from Anna's, it also seemed like Tolstoy had to struggle to try and get into a woman's head and heart to speak for her. For a man of any generation and culture to try and convey the emotions of a woman is a feat in and of itself, though (and the same goes for women writers who try to write from a male point of view) and he did it as well as can be expected.
I won't give anything away, but let me just say that I'm also a little conflicted about the famous ending. On the one hand I can genuinely appreciate it as the outcome of one particular story that is not necessarily how someone else's story with the same events would have ended, but I also can't help but feel that it's an almost misogynistic conclusion one might expect from a man of that generation and culture. That sounds so militantly feminist but I can't help it! That's just how it struck me. Still, one can't deny its dramatic effect.
There is a new translation of AK out written by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, and it's been getting a lot of attention via Oprah's Book Club and book reviewers. I'm not likely to re-read AK anytime soon, but I might pick up their translation of War & Peace to see if it flows better than the one I have. At any rate, everyone is saying that if you're planning to read English translations of either Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky, the Pevear/Volokhonsky versions best capture the original feel.
Painful story of the results of making poor choices August 12, 2008
Henry Cate III (CA. United States)
I love the account about Teddy Roosevelt that David McCullough gave at a commencement speech:
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. . . Once upon a time in the dead of winter in Dakota territory, with the temperature well below zero, young Theodore Roosevelt took off in a makeshift boat, accompanied by two of his ranch hands, down-stream on the Little Missouri River in chase of a couple of thieves who had stolen his prized row boat. After days on the river, he caught up and got the draw on them with his trusty Winchester, at which point they surrendered. Then, after finding a man with a team and a wagon, Roosevelt set off again to haul the thieves cross-country to justice. He left the ranch hands behind to tend to the boat, and walked alone behind the wagon, his rifle at the ready. They were headed across the snow covered wastes of the Bad Lands to the rail head at Dickinson, and Roosevelt walked the whole way, 40 miles. It was an astonishing feat, what might be called a defining moment in that eventful life. But what makes it especially memorable is that during that time, he managed to read all of Anna Karenina."
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Then David said: "I often think of that when I hear people say they haven't time to read."
Well I did it. I finally read Anna Karenina.
The story displays life in Russia in the 1870s. There are broad strokes taking place in at a variety of places, with a wide range of characters. One of the main characters is Anna Karenina. Anna falls in love for Count Alexei Kirillovich Vronsky. Vronsky falls in love for Anna. Anna leaves her husband and runs away with Vronsky.
While reading this I often thought that so many problems would be avoided if people just did the right thing. Anna ended up destroying so many lives.
I can't say I enjoyed the book. I found it interesting. I'm glad I finally read it. But it wasn't a fun book. It wasn't uplifting. It was a class Russian novel and most everyone suffers.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 11
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