Anna Karenina (Annotated with Biography and Critical Essay) PDF Download

Author: Leo Tolstoy
Publisher: Golgotha Press
ISBN: 1610426398
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 1397

View

Book Description
Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina is the story of a woman, Anna, wife of Alexei Alexandrovich Karenin. She is an apparently happily married matron of the Russian upper class. The novel begins with her attempt to smooth the troubled waters of her brother’s adulterous affair. Due to circumstances surrounding this situation she ends up in an adulterous affair of her own with a wealthy army officer, Count Vronsky. The novel is about the choices people make and the consequences of their actions in a society of strict social rules, hypocrisies and prejudices. Tolstoy weaves a story of great intricacy with a myriad of characters that move the action forward. Anna’s actions as a married woman involved in an extramarital affair eventually lead her to be outcast from her own society. She goes into an emotional decline and in time, commits suicide. The novel has a subplot about a young woman named Kitty who is courted by both Count Vronsky and a landowner, Konstantin Dmitrich Levin. She prefers Vronsky, but when she finds out about his affair with Anna, she is devastated and turns to Levin for comfort, and marries him. Their situation is a positive note in the novel - they enjoy a contented marriage. This annotated edition includes a biography and critical essay.

Author: Leo Tolstoy
Publisher: Golgotha Press
ISBN: 161042638X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 147

View

Book Description
Leo Tolstoy’s short story “Family Happiness” was published in 1859. The theme was the role of women in society. At the time of its creation, Tolstoy was not married, but wished to be. The letters he wrote to Valeria Arseneva, whom he was in love with at the time, reflect many of the sentiments and ideas that were expressed in the story. In his letters he spelled out in great detail what should be expected of a husband and wife in their marriage. Tolstoy is also thought to have been influenced by the works of two French writers, Proudhon and Michelet, who had recently published works on the same subject. “Family Happiness” is told in the first person by a woman (Masha) who has long been married. She relates her courtship, wedding, early happiness in her married state, estrangement from her husband, and an eventual reconciliation. The first part of the story is about her courtship by her future husband when she was only seventeen – her mother had just died and Masha becomes involved with her guardian, Sergei Mikhailych. Her account of this courtship is lyrical and romantic. Sergei tells Masha that happiness can only be found by “living for others”. He has very rigid ideas of what marriage should be, and what Masha’s role is. This annotated edition includes a biography and critical essay.

Author: Leo Tolstoy
Publisher: Golgotha Press
ISBN: 1610426355
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 122

View

Book Description
Tolstoy begins The Death of Ivan Ilyich with the protagonist’s death and moves backward from there. The novel opens with Peter Ivanovich reading about the death of his fellow judge and friend Ivan Ilyich, who has just died at the age of forty-five. Peter is with a group of legal representatives during a break in a trial as he glances through the obituaries. With the news of their colleague’s death, each man thinks about how Ivan’s passing might benefit them. None of them are looking forward to visiting the family to pay their respects. It is just a social obligation. This annotated edition includes a biography and critical essay.

Author: Leo Tolstoy
Publisher: Golgotha Press
ISBN: 1610425901
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 697

View

Book Description
Resurrection, published in 1899, was Tolstoy’s last novel. It first appeared in serialized form in the publication Niva – the sales went to help the Dukhobors, a religious group that was being persecuted by the established Russian church. The book was translated into English in 1899 by Louise and Aylmer Maude. Tolstoy himself did not hold The Resurrection in high regard, and many historians believe he finished it quickly in order to hasten its use as a money raiser for the Dukhobors, whose situation had reached a crisis point. It is thought that largely due to the efforts of Tolstoy and others the Canadian government offered land in British Columbia for the resettlement of the sect. Resurrection is a novel of conversion – that the corrupted world can be cured of its ills if only it follows the right path. The protagonist of Resurrection, Nekhlyudov, like Tolstoy, refuses to accept the corruption of the world as it is and has a black and white vision of what the world should be. This annotated edition includes a biography and critical essay.

Author: Leo Tolstoy
Publisher: Golgotha Press
ISBN: 1610426401
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 122

View

Book Description
A Confession was written in the last decade of the 19th century and was mainly a treatise on the meaning of life. Tolstoy had by this point had a religious awakening and had wrestled for decades with the purpose of his life on Earth. Tolstoy had questioned his faith when still an adolescent. He had been raising, like the majority of Russians, in the official established church of the country – the Russian Orthodox Church. The trappings of religion, such as genuflecting, meant nothing to him and he formed the opinion that often people who proclaimed to be good religious folk were often inferior morally to those who were agnostic or atheist in their beliefs. This annotated edition includes a biography and critical essay.

Author: Leo Tolstoy
Publisher: Golgotha Press
ISBN: 1610426444
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 2245

View

Book Description
War and Peace begins with a scene at a party in St. Petersburg in 1805. It is the Napoleonic era – the French general has conquered much of Western Europe and Russia is nervous. Russia is allied with the Austrian Empire which is resisting Napoleon’s forces along its borders. At the party the reader is introduced to the main characters including Pierre Bezukhov and Andrew Bolkonski and members of two families: Vasili, Anatole, and Helene Kuragin and Natasha, Sonya, and Nicholas Rostov. The plot is driven by the actions of the families – Andrew and Pierre join the Russian army at the Austrian Front, Nicholas almost gambles his family’s fortune away, and when Pierre returns home, he almost kills his wife’s lover. Andrew, missing in action on the Austrian Front, eventually returns home to find his wife has just died in childbirth. This annotated edition includes a biography and critical essay.

Author: Bob Blaisdell
Publisher: Pegasus Books
ISBN: 9781643134628
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 0

View

Book Description
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.

Author: Leo Tolstoy
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 758

View

Book Description
Anna Karenina is a novel by the Russian author Leo Tolstoy, first published in book form in 1878. Many writers consider Anna Karenina the greatest work of literature ever and Tolstoy himself called it his first true novel. It was initially released in serial installments from 1873 to 1877 in the periodical The Russian Messenger.A complex novel in eight parts, with more than a dozen major characters, it is spread over more than 800 pages (depending on the translation and publisher), typically contained in two volumes. It deals with themes of betrayal, faith, family, marriage, Imperial Russian society, desire, and rural vs. city life.

Author: Leo Tolstoy
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0345803930
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 978

View

Book Description
The official movie tie-in to the major motion picture starring Keira Knightly, Jude Law, Emily Watson, and Aaron Johnson, directed by Joe Wright. This ebook edition also includes the screenplay by Tom Stoppard. Leo Tolstoy’s classic story of doomed love is one of the most admired novels in world literature. Generations of readers have been enthralled by his magnificent heroine, the unhappily married Anna Karenina, and her tragic affair with dashing Count Vronsky. In their world frivolous liaisons are commonplace, but Anna and Vronsky’s consuming passion makes them a target for scorn and leads to Anna’s increasing isolation. The heartbreaking trajectory of their relationship contrasts sharply with the colorful swirl of friends and family members who surround them, especially the newlyweds Kitty and Levin, who forge a touching bond as they struggle to make a life together. Anna Karenina is a masterpiece not only because of the unforgettable woman at its core and the stark drama of her fate, but also because it explores and illuminates the deepest questions about how to live a fulfilled life. Translated by Louise and Aylmer Maude

Author: Nilo Cruz
Publisher: ReadHowYouWant.com
ISBN: 1458781240
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 134

View

Book Description
Winner of the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, this lush romantic drama depicts a family of cigar makers whose loves and lives are played out against the backdrop of America in the midst of the Depression. Set in Ybor City (Tampa) in 1930, Cruz imagines the catalytic effect the arrival of a new ''lector (who reads Tolstoys Anna Karenina to the workers as they toil in the cigar factory) has on a Cuban-American family. Cruz celebrates the search for identity in a new land.