Excellent novel. Quite evocative and challenging. Tolstoy has created some noteable characters in the form of Anna, Levin, Steve, Kitty, Dolly etc. Anna is once loved then despised then pitied in every conceivable order to the reader. Not as lengthy or as widespread in its scope as War and Peace, nor just as satisfying; it is nevertheless a top novel. ( )

A Russian Soap Opera! ( )

A very good and easy book to read. Chapters our short and the language simple anyone with basic English should be able to read this book. Lots of different themes the work it's way through the pages. ( )

Anna Karenina: Leo Tolstoy

Listened on audio 2009.

I was with this book for what seemed a great length of time and immersed in the detail of it, the incisive, delicate, analytical almost surgical depiction of character was engrossing and at the same time oddly numbing. The characters were so lifelike it felt really as if they could just be in the next room, or passing along the street (perhaps a consequence of listening in the car). I didn’t think of not finishing the book but it didn’t carry me in that dynamic way which, for me, is the real pleasure of reading. I wanted to know what happened next, but was quite cool about it. The pleasure was more touching and intimate, that complex joy of a private conversation with a close friend, the sharing of some secret knowledge.

Although there is an overlaying sermon in the plot (Anna the adulteress, driven mad by guilt and grief, constructs her own end) the characters are complex and evolving so, while the story is fatalistic, it isn’t exactly contrived. A whole epoch of Russian politics and social history is worked in to the plot and in the reading process none of this seems terribly onerous but having completed it is astonishing to reflect on the scope of the book.

It is interesting to observe that I did not actually enjoy or even like the story, it lacked suspense and mystery for me, but I did admire and learn from it and found pleasure in reading and also a kinship with the characters, which I can’t remember feeling so profoundly with any other book. I’m not sure whether, in the future, I might try War and Peace!

Published in serial installments from 1873 to 1877 in The Russian Messenger

As a sobering footnote to the book, particularly taking in the famous opening line “all happy families are alike, but each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way”, the diaries of Leo Tolstoy’s wife Sofia paint a picture of a cruel and difficult man, indifferent to his family and endlessly critical.
“All the things that he preaches for the happiness of humanity only complicate life to the point where it becomes harder and harder for me to live,” wrote Sofia – who transcribed all of Tolstoy’s manuscripts, including War and Peace, in longhand – at the start of 1895.

It is also spooky, with all the significance given to trains in the novel that Tolstoy himself died on a journey in the home of the stationmaster of the small depot at Astapovo, Russia, on November 9, 1910. ( )

yet to be read