
Love it means too much to me far more than you can understand At its simplest Anna Karenina is a love story It is a portrait of a beautiful & intelligent woman whose passionate love for a handsome officer sweeps aside all other ties
- to her marriage & to the network of relationships & moral values that bind the society around her The love affair of Anna & Vronsky is played out alongside the developing romance of Kitty & Levin & in the character of Levin closely based on Tolstoy himself the search for happiness takes on a deeper philosophical significance One of the greatest novels ever written Anna Karenina combines penetrating psychological insight with an encyclopedic depiction of Russian life in the 1870s The novel takes us from high society St Petersburg to the threshing fields on Levin&s estate with unforgettable scenes at a Moscow ballroom the skating rink a race course a railway station It creates an intricate labyrinth of connections that is profoundly satisfying & deeply moving Rosamund Bartlett&s translation conveys Tolstoy&s precision of meaning & emotional accuracy in an English version that is highly readable & stylistically faithful Like her acclaimed biography of Tolstoy it is vivid nuanced & compelling