Winston fitted a nib into the penholder and sucked it to get the grease off. This was not illegal (nothing was illegal, since there were no longer any laws), but if detected it was reasonably certain that it would be punished by death, or at least by twenty-five years in a forced-labour camp. ' Anna Karenina is one of the greatest love stories in world literature.' As Matthew Arnold wrote in his celebrated essay on Tolstoy: 'We are not to take Anna Karenina as a work of art we are to take it as a piece of life.The thing that he was about to do was to open a diary.

'Now and then Tolstoy's novel writes its own self, is produced by its matter, but its subject,' noted Vladimir Nabokov. Taken together, the two plots embroider a vast canvas that ultimately encompasses all levels of Russian society.

Levin's spiritual searching and growth reflect the religious ideals that at the time Tolstoy was evolving for himself. Running parallel is the story of the courtship and marriage of Konstantin Levin (the melancholy nobleman who is Tolstoy's stand-in) and Princess Kitty Shcherbatsky. Refusing to conduct a discreet affair, she scandalizes society by abandoning both her husband and her young son for Count Vronsky-with tragic consequences. A sophisticated woman who is respectably married to a government bureaucrat, Anna begins a passionate, all-consuming involvement with a rich army officer. Petersburg high society in the later half of the nineteenth century. 'Happy families are all alike every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.' So begins Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy's great modern novel of an adulterous affair set against the backdrop of Moscow and St. This edition, the famous Constance Garnett translation, has been revised throughout by Leonard J.

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