The listing, Anna Karenina By Leo Tolstoy has ended.
When Anna Karenina was being published serially between 1873 and 1877, the novel was the talk of Russia. Although Tolstoy was already known as the author of War and Peace, he now seemed to have created an entirely new universe. Never had a novel so candidly treated the fate of a woman like Anna Karenina--a beautiful, well-born woman who leaves her prosperous, highly stationed husband for the dashing Count Vronsky, throwing over her place in society for love. While describing this affair with a frankness and a sympathy unusual for his time, Tolstoy also explores with great delicacy the feelings of a much more conventional romance, the marriage of the Levins, one that incorporates vivid scenes from his own courtship and marriage. "We are not to take Anna Karenina as a work of art," Matthew Arnold once said. "We are to take it as a piece if life."