Anna Karenina (Easy Classics)

Written by Leo Tolstoy and Gemma Barder

Narrated by Dan Bottomley

An adapted and illustrated edition of the Russian classic, at an easy-to-read level for all ages!
Anna Karenina appears to have the perfect life. Young and beautiful, she lives in a fashionable house in Moscow with her respected husband and their young son. But Anna is deeply unhappy. Her older husband bores her, and she misses the lively city she grew up in. Then Count Vronsky, a dashing young officer, invites her to dance at a ball.
Will Anna protect the comfortable life she has, or risk it all for forbidden love?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Sweet Cherry Publishing
• Release date: Jul 8, 2021
• ISBN: 9781782267829

Leo Tolstoy

Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910) was a Russian author of novels, short stories, novellas, plays, and philosophical essays. He was born into an aristocratic family and served as an officer in the Russian military during the Crimean War before embarking on a career as a writer and activist. Tolstoy’s experience in war, combined with his interpretation of the teachings of Jesus, led him to devote his life and work to the cause of pacifism. In addition to such fictional works as War and Peace (1869), Anna Karenina (1877), and The Death of Ivan Ilyich (1886), Tolstoy wrote The Kingdom of God is Within You (1893), a philosophical treatise on nonviolent resistance which had a profound impact on Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. He is regarded today not only as one of the greatest writers of all time, but as a gifted and passionate political figure and public intellectual whose work transcends Russian history and literature alike.

Reviews for Anna Karenina (Easy Classics)

[therebelprince · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I would consider War and Peace the greater novel, but gosh, isn't this a fantastic piece of work? What author so successfully places us inside the head of each of its characters, moving them forward with an unrelenting pace while also tying them so closely to the fortunes of their nation? Wondrous.

[anacarter-127109 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Anna Karenina is one of the two main characters in the novel she is an aristocrat from St. Petersburg, Russia. This story takes place in the 1800s, where adultery and divorce was illegal. She captures the attention of everyone in society by the way she carries herself. She commits adultery; she cannot live without her lover. She is well mannered and outspoken. She is a young married woman, who has one young son. Unfortunately she sees a very handsome young man, named Vronsky, and she instantly becomes attracted to him, when their eyes meet. Vronsky is wealthy, he is a military officer. He is passionate, and caring for Anna. He becomes charmed by her beauty upon meeting her. She has an affair with him and commits adultery. She cannot live without her lover, even though her husband tells her to leave him. She is now pregnant with her lovers child, and her husband loves her so much that he is willing to raise the child as his own, as long as she leaves her lover, Vronsky. Her husband Karenin is a high-ranking Government Minister, who forgives her of committing adultery.


Anna is the beautiful, passionate, and educated wife of Alexei Karenin, a cold and passionless government official. Her character is rich in complexity: she is guilty of desecrating her marriage and home, for instance, but she remains noble and admirable nonetheless. Anna is intelligent and literate, a reader of English novels and a writer of children's books. She is elegant, always understated in her dress. Her many years with Karenin show her capable of playing the role of cultivated, beautiful, society wife and hostess with great poise and grace. She is very nearly the ideal aristocratic Russian wife of the 1870s.


Her affair throws her into social exile, misery and eventually makes her commit suicide, because her love moves on with someone else.


The other main character is Levin. He is independent-minded and socially awkward. He is truly an individual character who fits into none of the obvious classifications of Russian society. Levin is his own person. He follows his own vision of things, even when it is confused and foggy, rather than adopting any group's prefabricated views. Moreover, Levin prefers isolation over fitting in with a social set with which he is not wholly comfortable. In this he resembles Anna, whose story is a counterpart to his own in its search for self-definition and individual happiness.


He falls in love with Kitty, Anna's friend, despite that they are from different social classes. Kitty being a Princess, and Levin being a Peasant. The two, struggle to find each other and happiness as they create a life together. . She gives up being a princess because she loves him, and she moves to his farm and becomes a peasant.




[THEMES]
Adultery

Social issue
Society will react negatively to this adultery
Karenin > willing to overlook Anna's affair as long as she doesn't want to get a divorce
Anna tries to escape society in Italy and on the country side
Social criticism/marital betrayal


Forgiveness

Forgiveness are sometimes compromised >Dolly forgiving Stiva for cheating
When Anna begs Karenin [has little effect> Anna continues loving Vronsky]
Ongoing process that may grow or diminish
Anna begs for forgiveness before committing suicide
Overall, I really enjoyed both the novel and the film. I usually don't read novels in this genre, but I really liked this one. If you get a chance, you should definitely check this book out! I highly recommend it!

Happy Reading!

-Ana @SoManyBooksSoLittleTime

This review will is also posted on my blog

[steve02476 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

What a beautiful book, I’ve a had a wonderful time reading it. (Actually, listening to it.) I guess I need to read more Tolstoy! What a great understanding of personality, psychology, etc. Also a lot of humor mixed in with sadness, struggle, etc.

Enjoyed Maggie Gyllenhaal’s reading - a little flat, subtle, not terribly dramatic, not very distinct voices or anything — but I think that let the writing and story really show through.

[alisony-1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

So I finally got to the end of Anna Karenina. My reading speed is no reflection on the book - work's super busy and of course Christmas silly season is upon us when many an evening is spent glued to my laptop looking for gifts. And I'm back to the gym after Covid, so that burns up a few evenings a week as well. All in all, I've not had much available reading time each day.As so many people have already read this classic I'll stick to my thoughts rather than a review of the plot. Whilst it's a fairly lengthy tome, for the most part I was fully engrossed in it (and the pages where a glazed a little were less than double figures). So what was the draw? Characterisation is the big one that stood out, particularly the character contrasts between the two main couples in the novel. Tolstoy does a good job of humanising his characters, revealing their many layers as the novel develops. On many pages I was finding Anna entirely self-satisfying and not overly likeable, yet as the book progresses we see her frailties and no doubt genuine love - to the point of obsession - of Vronsky. As a reader we're torn between thoughts of 'well, you made your bed so you'd better lie in it' and sympathy for someone who in a loveless marriage who simply is dazzled by love. Vronsky similarly feels like a selfish playboy at the beginning of the novel, but his genuine love for Anna by the end is clear.Levin's relationship with Kitty is an interesting parallel, a chalk and cheese pair compared to the fiery romance between Anna and Vronsky. Still waters run deep with Levin, whose thoughts are consumed with self-questioning and desire to work towards the greater good. A totally different man to Vronsky, but who of the two is the most noble in the end?The second big draw for me in this novel was the setting of Imperial Russia. I knew little of the lifestyle of the nobility in this period in Russian history, and this backdrop was fascinating, from 'society' in Moscow and St. Petersburg to Levin's country dwelling and interaction with the muzhiks post the abolition of serfdom. Tolstoy's descriptions were incredibly vivid, from the dust on the face of travellers who had come the last leg of their journey by carriage to the epic train journeys regularly taken as the society characters moved between their own houses and those of family and acquaintances they went to stay with.If I have one criticism it's that the last 50 pages felt a little flat in comparison with the rest of the novel. Tolstoy tries to bring the novel to a moral finale, but somehow it felt a bit contrived and rushed along to the conclusion he wanted to get to. But it's a small criticism in a work that was a rich tapestry and hugely enjoyable.4.5 stars - a wonderful epic that deserves rereading.

[jwhenderson_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Tolstoy encompasses the whole world within his novels. This novel exemplifies his approach that at once brings into focus the humanity of his characters, the details of the world in which they live, and the philosophies by which they guide their lives. Spinning his tale of Anna and her passions out from a small moment in the life of one unhappy family Tolstoy shows again and again how our lives are intertwined with each other. His uncanny ability to demonstrate psychological insight into the characters is amazing from the moment they are introduced through the denouement and epilogue of this massive tale.

[seriousgrace · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Who doesn't know the tragic story of Anna Karenina? When the story was complete I found myself asking does Anna our deserve pity? Many see her love for another man other than her husband as a tragedy. Indeed, Anna's husband only cares about how society will view him in regards to her infidelity. Karenin is weak, cold and completely unlikable. However, there was another far more appealing couple. I found Konstantine Levin's relationship with Kitty far more enthralling and far more tragic. As an aside, when I first picked up Anna Karenina I wondered to myself what made this story nearly one thousand pages long. The more I got into it, the more it became clear Tolstoy could spend entire chapters on the threshing of fields, the racing of horses, croquet competitions, and philosophical tirades about Russian society. Condensed down, Anna Karenina is simply about unhappy relationships; specifically an unhappily married woman who has to chose between her duty as a mother and her emotional attachment to a lover. We all know how that turns out.

[ponsonby_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

When you have read this book, you realise how inadequate are the various TV and film adaptations (I have seen 9 different ones, and even the best go nowhere deep enough into the characters' minds and emotions)

[marse_4 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I've read this novel at least twice before (parts of it in Russian) and I'm always amazed at how well Tolstoy is able to capture Anna's disintegrating and confused mind at the end. Not just Anna's, but Levin's torturous thoughts in regards to Kitty, and his purpose in life. I've been won over by Pevear and Volokhonsky's translation. Not sure I like their Dostoevsky translations so well, but they do a wonderful job with Tolstoy.

[infjsarah · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Anna Karenina is a classic I have wanted to read for a long time. Needing a break from a long fantasy series on audio, I decided to finally go for it on audio. I really enjoyed it - it wasn't what I expected at all. I wanted to know what happened next and even the ruminations by Levin on farming and society didn't bore me. The only time I was like "oh get on with it" was towards the end where certain bits seemed unnecessary. It was very well read by David Horovitch.

[akbouterse · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I enjoyed this book. There were times where it seemed to just drag on and sometimes I was bored out of my mind but overall I found the experience of reading this book to be an interesting one. I liked the look it gave at Russian society and I liked the story about the lives of various families living in that society. This book was very different from what I usually read but still very enjoyable. I'm happy I read this even though it was very long.

[comfypants · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

A married woman falls in love with a jerk.2/4 (Indifferent)I gave up after 150 pages. It's nice of the edition I read to spoil the ending on the back, so I know it's not going to go anywhere good. I didn't exactly dislike what I read of the book, but I really do not need to read 700 more pages of it.(Oct. 2021)

[caanderson-1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A look into Russian society among the rich and poor. The complicated social norms are exhausting and not too different from American societies.

[completely_melanie · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

Not a fan. Everyone is cheating on everyone.

[davidroche_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Summer Classic project. I loved War and Peace but am clearly not worthy of loving Anna Karenina (Penguin Classics) by Leo Tolstoy. I mean, what is wrong with these people? Spoiler alert: at least I lasted until the end. Great characterisation but the endless angst, philosophical self-flagellation and agrarian detail nearly got the better of me. I have greater sympathy with The Russian Revolution than I did before reading it.

[connorshirs · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

The people I am acquainted with continuously joke about how I force Anna Karenina into every conversation with an appeasable demeanor—only because I have an undying passion for everything that defines this book.

Tolstoy portrays Levin; who I believe to be despicable—regardless of the correlations between Levin and the author—who is the debated protagonist of the story. I despised whenever Levin appeared within the narrative, I just wanted the focus to be on Anna.

Despite the dull ending and unnecessary Levin narrative, this holds to be my favorite book; usurping Dickens’ Great Expectations and Wharton’s The Age of Innocence. Anna is a highly relatable character and her devastation is what makes this book iconic to a modern reader.

[aladyinredpolish · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Extraordinarily written! The type of book to awaken all senses and feel deeply. It's like meeting a friend, traveling on vacation, and then throughout the entire process being absolutely mesmerized by the way the Author writes. The best book I have read.

[kittycunningh-815148 · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

There were some really good parts, but they don't make up for aaaaaaaaaaaallllllllll the tedious parts.

I listened to the audio book and had 2 hours leading up to her suicide when I turned it off. I just didn't care enough about her to listen to it. Frankly, I wished she'd done it sooner and more quickly.

[sgtcat · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I finished this book because I wanted to know what was going to happen to the characters. They are well written, for the most part. I also enjoyed the glimpses into life in the 1870s. It’s odd to realize that people almost 150 years ago had many of the same problems and concerns that we still have today.

That being said, I kept zoning out because a lot of this book consists of useless nattering. Maybe it was important to character building? I don’t know, but it started to wear on me in a serious way.

[nx74defiant · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Anna Karenina is of course the title character. But the book spends just as much time with Levin and Kitty as it does with Anna. I found myself getting annoyed with Anna.

[stillatim · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

The first time I read AK (in the Pev & Vol translation) I was a little disappointed; this time, in this recent Marian Schwartz translation, no such problems. I'm still not ready to rank it *ahead* of War & Peace, but I now concede that it is, in fact, a masterpiece of a novel. In large part this is because (for whatever reason) this time through I was quite comfortable with not liking Anna or Vronsky at all; the first time I read it, I thought I was meant to like them, and didn't.

Well, you know about the book. It's good. If you don't know it, there are plot spoilers ahead.

Schwartz's translation is very interesting--much less literary than Pev & Vol, a kind of AK for the post Knausgaard world, maybe? Except Schwartz worked on it for 10 years, so it's not as if she just heard that people maybe were looking to read very long, unliterary books, and whipped this off last week. But the comparison (to other fellows (always fellows) on the "strip it back to the wood" side of things (e.g., Eggers)) is interesting, because Schwartz's Tolstoy not only got in first (see the theoretical discussion of French literature towards the end of the book), but did it so much better that I suspect the Eggerses and potentially even the Knausgaards might be better off doing something else.

Here's how Schwartz rendered my favorite line from my first reading:

"One cannot forbid someone to make himself a big wax doll and kiss it. But if this person with the doll were to come and sit down before a man in love and begin caressing his doll the way the lover caressed his beloved, the lover would find it distasteful."

And despite the awkwardness, it's not too unpleasant to read the whole thing like this. Tolstoy's points become clearer in prose that avoids the niceties, and his psychological precision is just as impressive. Consider the second to last part, which ends with Anna's suicide: in this volume, it's excruciatingly boring, like Proust only with all the humor and style drained out. We follow Levin and Dolly into 'society.' He visits everyone in Moscow; they are incomprehensibly dull. She visits Anna and Vronsky, they are painfully fake and ridiculous. This goes on for quite some time. It's very, very, very boring--and then Anna kills herself, and even though I'm not a big fan of Anna, it's pretty obvious why. She's trapped herself in this fake and ridiculous life, and not only that, she can only yearn for the incomprehensibly dull. She no longer wants (what Tolstoy considers) solid and good. She lives in complete despair--and by making those chapters so, so dull, we feel that despair entirely.

Take that, David Foster Wallace. Also, Anna's stream-of-consciousness is far more impressive than Molly Bloom's. So take that, Joyce.

None of which is to say Tolstoy is better than those guys. Just they are better, it isn't because they're better at the things they're famous for.

[arewenotben · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Not sure what I can say that hasn't been stated countless times before, impressed particularly with the complexity of the inner lives. All the main characters are fully rounded, Tolstoy encouraging empathy for almost all the situations. Anna's despair of her situation at the close was harrowing, one of the best written accounts of depression I can remember reading. Glad I read the book after some life experience, not sure what I'd get out of it as a teenager.

[amanda4242_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Good, but I could have lived with less Levin--who the hell needs that many chapters of a guy mowing?!

[renardkitsune · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Now that I have finished the book, I appreciate that the introduction in my edition mentions that Tolstoy passes no judgment on his characters--he merely describes. I think this description he helped me enjoy the book more that I would have otherwise. And I think that Tolstoy’s powers of description of characters are so immense because there is no judgement. Characters may judge each other, but the narrative does not. Until the end! I don’t want to spoil anything, but characters who embrace Christianity fare much better than characters that do not, or do not actively think about their religion. I liked how different characters’ stories would slow and speed up at different parts of the narrative, but I found it was slow going despite the pacing quickening at times. I had to discipline myself to keep picking up this book each evening. But I’m happy I made it through though, some of the better parts were near the end of the book.

[sosseres · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

To me this reads more like a series of short stories connected together into a chronological order than a book with one story (and message). There are several scenes I felt were great when read but add next to nothing to the book.The message at the end of the book is clear and many situations that don't really fit into the book builds towards that. Yet Russian politics could have been cut out of the book and it would still have had the same overarching story and just a few scenes changing places. I enjoyed learning about how Tolstoy thought about the time-period and its people but didn't feel it added much to the story being told.Overall I am happy to have read it but will stand by what I said when asked about it, it has great scenes but doesn't feel like a book.

[k6gst · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

One of the best things about being a Russian aristocrat has got to be that you can just stop your carriage alongside any field and yell at a random peasant and they will drop whatever dumb peasant job they’re doing and run off to do whatever thing you yell at them to do. “You there! You! Run ahead to the manor and inform the Count’s groom that I wish him to make ready the stables.”“Riiiight. And just who the hell are you?”But they never say that! They just run ahead to make sure the stables are ready. Fantastic.Reading Anna Karenina was part of my reinvigorated program to grab something on my shelf that I’d been meaning to read and just read the bastard, fifty pages a day until it’s done. It's sublime.This is the mastery of Tolstoy: In a thousand pages of interpersonal failures, slights, feuds, marriages, love affairs, elections, engagements, spa treatments, farming, and philosophical banter, with every human virtue and vice on display, he never once tips his hand and telegraphs what we are supposed to think about a character. They are fully-realized human figures, and all you can do is experience and feel with them. If you’re going to judge them for good or ill, you do it on your own. He doesn’t do any of that for you.

[yhgail · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

An enjoyable read. Ended a bit different than I expected. This is the first time I've read this.

[thedivineoomba · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

First, I started this book 4ish years ago. I would read a chunk of it, than stop for awhile, and pick it up a few months later. Its not an easy read - mostly because it seems like the names keep changing. I understand, what a person in Russia is called is dependent on the relationship, but its difficult. It took me awhile to figure it out. It also helped that the last third of the book had less characters. It would have helped to have a list of full names for the characters. Its a difficult book, but the pay off is immense if you can stick with it.This next part has spoilers, so, read at your own risk.Anne Karenina isn't necessarily about Anna - although the other characters revolve around her. This is a story about relationships. Good relationships, bad relationships and how society views relationships depending on gender. Anna is bored wife of a bureaucrat. Her husband provides for her, and lets her do her own thing, he doesn't make her a part of his life, basically ignoring her until he needs her presence. Anna is intelligent, beautiful, and make a whole room light up when she walks in. When she meets a military man named Vronsky, her whole world is turned upside down. He is a cad, leading young women on, and than dropping them as soon as he looses interest. But, Anna seduces him - even after she denies him, he continue to pursue and eventually Anna gives in. Her husband tries to make it work, but the allure of Vronsky calls - Anna eventually leaves him for Vronsky. But, Anna is still not free. Until she is granted a divorce, she is only a mistress and is ostracized from society, living a lonelier life than before. Eventually, this gets to her and she commits suicide by throwing herself before a train.The next couple is Dotty and Oblansky. Oblansky is Anna's brother, and like to spend money, dote on ballerina's, and gamble. Dotty holds the family together - making sure that there is money for the most basic of upper-class necessities. She considers divorcee him a number of times throughout the book, but it would leave her in a similar state as Anna, even though she would be in the right of the law.The last couple is Kitty and Levin. Kitty is Dotty's sister, and she was the young girl Vronsky led on right before Anna. Kitty ends up sick from the whole experience, but ultimately recovers when Levin ultimately proposes to her. They are the perfect couple, in love, and able to talk through problems, understanding each other's personalities, the good and the bad. These three couples form the core of what Anna Karenina is about. There is also a large parts of the book devoted to Levin's thoughts about peasantry, land management, pointlessness of the upper-class life in Moscow, and belief in God. I'm still pondering what this adds to the book, because it seems not to add anything, and at times, its overwritten and tends to ramble. I do think Levin is based off of Tolstoy and his life, but large chunks of this could have been removed to no effect of the rest.

[antao-3 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

(Original Review, 1981-02-24)If you're not familiar with the The Orthodox Church's intricacies, don't bother reading the novel. It might also to understand the social context in which Anna Karenina is set, which Tolstoy doesn't explain because he was writing for fellow members of the Orthodox Church who would have understood the particular nuances. For Russian society at the time, an immoral act was one that offended all Creation and therefore God himself - it is quite common for Russian priests even now to admonish those confessing to serious sins by telling them that they are 'spitting in Christ's face'. Yet there are subtleties to Anna's predicament that are probably lost on Westerners: unlike the Roman Catholic Church, which forbids divorce for any reason, the Orthodox Church permits this where a marriage has irrevocably broken down, on the basis that it was never based on true love in the first place and thus null and void. So in the novel it is only Karenin's pride (which for the Orthodox is the greatest sin of all) that stands in the way of dissolving his tragically unhappy marriage. Anna's action challenges the hypocrisy of society and she brings down the anger of the hypocrites upon herself because she has the barefaced cheek to expect people to behave towards her as they did before her "fall" from grace. Her "friends", such as the poisonous Princess Betsy, desert her because she is an uncomfortable reminder of their own failings.In fact, I'd go a little further and suggest that the absence of clearly defined mores has led to the proliferation of petty judgementalism infiltrating every aspect of life. It's like Jacques Lacan said about Dostoyevsky's famous quote, ('If God is dead, everything is permitted'), accurately turning it around to say "If God is dead, nothing is permitted." And so we all throw the first stone at one another...The great Victorian judge and political philosopher James Fitzjames Stephen said that the main deterrent to crime is not the law, but public opinion. He was right. One of the reasons Arab countries have such a low crime rate is that a thief would be shunned by his family and wider community. The most judgmental people I know are self-described non-judgmentalists: they hate (straightforwardly) judgmental people, i.e. people with personalities, who don't have to cling on to PC BS in order to create a persona for themselves.PS. Something I didn't know until recently was that Vronsky, like Levin, was based on Tolstoy's own experiences. He represented Tolstoy's own shallow, artificial lifestyle that he gave up and was ashamed of. Vronsky is mature, attractive and amoral. He sees nothing wrong with pursuing a married woman because society's hypocrisy allows for that, but he gets in deeper than he intended. Not the deepest of characters, but Vronsky's casting in this film was absolutely ridiculous.

[starla_aurora · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

I tried. I have read 1/3 of the book, thr writing is amazing. But the story is dull. 3 relationships crash and burn from adultery or failure to communicate. Maybe if I read this back in high school I would think differently. But in 2017, after reading so many books with the same story line. After all the hype over this book, I expected more.

[jeterat-844391 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Feeling super accomplished to have finished this giant book. It's been on my list of intimidating reads for a long time, and I started it twice in the last several years before I was able to finish it on this read. I think part of the reason that I was unable to finish it before was that I was not really ready to accept it's content. Although titled Anna Karenina, the book is not really solely about her, but more about a concept of prideful, love for love's sake versus a more family based love, that she suffers most from of all the characters in the novel. Terribly awkward way to put that...Nabokov put it much better.

I was impressed with how much I found relatable in this novel and I think that Tolstoy has a special talent for saying what is often felt in moments of great strife or love. His descriptions of Levin's struggles to propose to Kitty, Levin's and Kitty's opposite reactions on the birth of their son, and Anna's various passionate scenes bring to mind the vast array of emotions (not always the ones that we expect) that come about in moments like those described. I was disappointed in some scenes and bored at others, but I think that all of this emotion ultimately added to my enjoyment of the novel. He makes clear that while there are main characters experiencing their lives most passionate moments, there are also people passing by who know nothing about that and who are living their own, independent and equally important lives. It's a refreshing change from other novels that I've read and I haven't really ever read it's equal for scope. I highly recommend (if you are ready for a monumental reading task), especially if you are an avid reader and have a lot of context for this novel. This is definitely also on my list of novels to re-read someday, probably at a much later date when I've had more time to grow as a reader.