Anna Karenina is probably the most often taught nineteenth-century Russian novel in the American academy. Teachers have found that including this virtuoso work of art on a syllabus reaps many rewards and stirs up heated classroom discussion -- on sex and sexuality, dysfunction in the family, gender roles, society's hypocrisy and cruelty. But translation and transliteration problems, the peculiarity of Russian names and terms, and the unfamiliarity of Russian geography and history present a range of pedagogical challenges.

Liza Knapp offers a fresh approach to understanding Tolstoy's construction of his novel Anna Karenina and how he creates patterns of meaning. Her analysis draws on works that were critical to his understanding of the interconnectedness of human lives, including The Scarlet Letter, Middlemarch, and Blaise Pascal's Pens es. Knapp concludes with a tour-de-force reading of Mrs. Dalloway as Virginia Woolf's response to Tolstoy's treatment of Anna Karenina and others.

The renowned Russian writer Leo Tolstoy created a realistic masterpiece in Anna Karenina (1878). In the same work, moreover, he utilized allegory and symbol to an extent and at a level of sophistication unknown in his other works. In Browning's study, the author identifies and analyzes previously unnoticed or only briefly mentioned "linkages and keystones" found in two highly developed clusters of symbols, arising from Anna's momentous train ride and peasant nightmares, and of allegories, rooted in Vronsky's disastrous steeplechase. Within this labyrinth of symbol, allegory and structural patterning lies embedded much of the novel's most significant meaning. This study will be of particular interest to students and scholars of Russian literature, Tolstoy, symbol, allegory, structuralism, and moral criticism.

One of the greatest novels ever written, Anna Karenina is the story of a beautiful woman whose passionate love for a handsome officer sweeps aside all other ties. This major translation conveys Tolstoy's precision of meaning and emotional accuracy in an English version that is highly readable and stylistically faithful.

Launched in 1950, Penguin’s Russian Classics quickly progressed to include translations of many great works of Russian literature and the series came to be regarded by readers, both academic and general, as the de facto provider of classic Russian literature in English translation, the legacy of which reputation resonates right up to the present day. Through an analysis of the individuals involved, their agendas, and their socio-cultural context, this book, based on extensive original research, examines how Penguin’s decisions and practices when translating and publishing the series played a significant role in deciding how Russian literature would be produced and marketed in English translation. As such the book represents a major contribution to Translation Studies, to the study of Russian literature, to book history and to the history of publishing.

One hundred years after his death, Tolstoy still inspires controversy with his notoriously complex narrative strategies. This original book explores how and why Tolstoy has mystified interpreters and offers a new look at his most famous works of fiction.

The story behind the origins of Anna Karenina and the turbulent life and times of Leo Tolstoy. Anna Karenina is one of the most nuanced characters in world literature and we return to her, and the novel she propels, again and again. Remarkably, there has not yet been an examination of Leo Tolstoy specifically through the lens of this novel. Critic and professor Bob Blaisdell unravels Tolstoy’s family, literary, and day-to-day life during the period that he conceived, drafted, abandoned, and revised Anna Karenina. In the process, we see where Tolstoy’s life and his art intersect in obvious and unobvious ways. Readers often assume that Tolstoy, a nobleman-turned-mystic would write himself into the principled Levin. But in truth, it is within Anna that the consciousness and energy flows with the same depth and complexities as Tolstoy. Her fateful suicide is the road that Tolstoy nearly traveled himself. At once a nuanced biography and portrait of the last decades of the Russian empire and artful literary examination, Creating Anna Karenina will enthrall the thousands of readers whose lives have become deeper and clearer after experiencing this hallmark of world literature.