Anna Karenina

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Readers who do not wish to learn details of the plot will prefer to treat the Introduction as an Afterword.

ANNA KARENINA, one of the world’s greatest novels, and with justification regarded by many as Tolstoy’s finest artistic work, also marks the culmination of his career as a professional writer. Begun in 1873, when the author was 45 years old, it resumes and develops themes explored in previous works, most notably the epic War and Peace, which he had embarked on ten years earlier. These themes, which may be subsumed under the central question ‘how to live?’, are explored with a pressing urgency in Anna Karenina, for Tolstoy was increasingly overcome during the novel’s protracted composition by an existential despair which is reflected in its closing pages. While Anna Karenina represents the summation of the literary journey that Tolstoy had completed thus far, all the way from Childhood, his first work of published fiction of 1852, the novel also looks forward to what he would write over the next three decades of his life.

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