 Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
"Toltstoy towered above his age as Dante and Michelangelo and Beethoven had done above theirs." --Kenneth Clark
ANNA KARENINA and WAR AND PEACE, Tolstoy's masterpieces, could not stand farther apart in narrative scale. The latter is an epic novel of Napoleonic-threatened Europe, the former a deeply-moving, tragic love story. Anna's tale is simple and timeless: bored by her calculating husband, eager to feel the passion of love she reads about in books, she falls in love with Count Vronsky. But hers is a high passion and she would have Vronsky share it as intensely as she. However, Vronsky soon grows tired of the very word 'love,' seeking simpler pleasures. Against this ruinous affair are set the stories of other loves and other marriages. Tolstoy's narrative genius shines not only in the portraits he paints of human character but also in the detailed picture he paints of Russia in the late 19th Century: its splendid ballrooms, drawing rooms, racetracks, officers' clubs, all aspects of an aristocratic life that Tolstoy depicts in its seductive yet hypocritical glory.
The Folio Society edition of ANNA KARENINA is surely among the finest published in the 20th Century. Quaterbound in buckram, blocked and printed with pictorial sides, the novel is beautifully-illustrated on 14 full pages by Angela Barrett and insightfully-introduced by Helen Dunmore. Once again, The Folio Society heightens the reading of a great book by its marvelous bookcraft.
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