Anna Karenina

Tolstoy’s genius for viewing social classes in the largest possible context and for sketching the subtlest human gestures becomes most evident in Anna Karenina. To this novel he brought his troubling conviction that at his moments of most intense experience Man is closest to Death. This is the double drama of Anna and of Levin. Sensual, rebellious, Anna renounces respectable marriage and fine position for a passionate involvement which offers a taste of freedom and a trap for destruction. Levin, an eccentric and melancholy young nobleman, surrenders his individuality to live as a peasant.
Applauded as the greatest novel of modern social realism, Anna Karenina contains the nucleus of Tolstoy’s program for nonviolence and abstention from worldly riches — a program based on a personal interpretation of the Gospels that made him one of the world’s most venerated teachers.

Newly translated with a Foreword by David Magarshack.