Anna is intelligent and charming and beautiful and wonderfully dressed and clearly fundamentally good. I have read Anna Karenina many times, yet I always fall in love with Anna on first sight, just as Vronsky and Kitty fall in love with her when they first see her. Anna’s fate is tragic Kitty’s romantic Dolly’s pathetic. All three of these stories are concerned with marriage and love: their formation, their dissolution, their glories and perils. Anna and Vronsky almost take second place to Kitty and Levin and Dolly and Stiva. It may surprise those who read Anna Karenina for the first time just how little the eponymous heroine appears in the novel. In War and Peace these themes are exposed amid momentous historical events in Anna Karenina the scale is smaller, but history still intrudes. Both of them are about how it is we decide and make mistakes about whom and what we should love in life, to whom and to what we should give our loyalty, our belief, our faith. The world is still an awfully harsh place to those who step out of line or who cannot enter into prescribed ways of thinking and feeling.Īnna Karenina and War and Peace are often described as very different novels, and that is true.
And the targets and outward forms of social disapproval may be different now to what they were then, but they nevertheless exist. Its characters are among the most memorable ever created. The world it depicts and dissects remains fascinating in itself. Anna Karenina is a novel that beguiles and intrigues. What can it possiby have to say to us now? After all, it’s a novel written originally in Russian in the nineteenth century by an aristocrat about people falling in and out of love, when moral conventions and society’s strictures were different to what they are today, when divorce was rare and adultery could lead to social annihilation.
It is entirely legitimate to ask ourselves why we should bother to read Anna Karenina. It is beautifully presented by Alma Classics, and includes an interesting preface and translators’ note, informative notes to the text and useful extra material on Tolstoy’s life and works. This is a wonderful new translation of Tolstoy’s great novel that should enthrall a new generation of readers.
0 kommentar(er)
