Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy, Folio Society, 2008

Description: One of the great books of all literature in a strikingly beautiful edition! From an interesting double appreciation of Tolstoy's two great works in the WSJ (https://www.wsj.com/articles/tolstoys-classics-are-still-fresh-a-century-and-a-half-later-1508538512): I read Tolstoy this year to plug a literary gap unbefitting a book-review editor. Getting started was no easy task. His two pre-eminent novels, “War and Peace” and “Anna Karenina,” clock in at more than 1,200 and 800 pages respectively, the former so massive that Henry James called it a “loose, baggy monster.” Count me a fan of monsters... “Anna Karenina” came eight years later [after War and Peace]. It relates the trials of its title heroine, a strong-willed woman who has an affair with the charming Count Vronsky, bearing his child and the wrath of Russian society in turn. “Anna Karenina” has its own cast of unforgettable characters—Stepan “Stiva” Arkadyich Oblonsky, Anna’s jaunty, epicurean brother; and Konstantin Dmitrich Levin, the idealistic landowner (and Tolstoy’s self-modeled proxy). Like Bob Dylan’s “Visions of Johanna,” the settings and people that populate these two books have conquered my mind. It’s a common experience for readers of great literature. In last year’s “Books for Living,” Will Schwalbe recounts how he sobbed after he’d read “David Copperfield” for the first time, distraught that he’d miss the characters so much. Later in life, when asked if writing a book about his late mother would give him closure, Mr. Schwalbe remembered reading Dickens as a teenager and realized that closure wasn’t necessary when you could continue to talk with the deceased and the fictional alike. “Just because someone is gone,” Mr. Schwalbe observes, “doesn’t mean that person exits your life. I remember vividly the day during that hot summer when I finished David Copperfield. But my engagement with David and Little Emily and Steerforth and Dora . . . had just begun.” So it is with Pierre and Prince Andrei and Anna and Stiva. Though there’s plenty of heartbreak in “War and Peace” and “Anna Karenina,” each is also enormously life-affirming. Before Anna’s tragic fate crescendos, we find Levin and his wife, Kitty, at the bedside of his dying brother, Nikolai. Levin dreads death, but his remarkably poised wife helps him face it with courage. As Nikolai drifts away, Levin ... manages to keep his gloom at bay: “In spite of death, he felt the necessity to live and to love. He felt that love saved him from despair and that under the threat of despair this love was becoming still stronger and purer.” Nary a paragraph later, Nikolai since passed, Kitty learns she is pregnant, as one mystery of life supplants another. Thinking about this scene has been a comfort for me since. Both works are in every way “books for living,” rife with guiding principles for life. Themes of magnanimity and forgiveness figure prominently in each. In “War and Peace” there is a remarkable scene toward the end of the book in which Prince Andrei is wounded at Borodino. At the field hospital he finds the also-wounded Anatole Kuragin, whose attempt to seduce Andrei’s fiancée, Natasha, had led her to break off the engagement. Andrei had wanted revenge, but in the blood-soaked camaraderie wrought by war—Anatole ultimately has his leg amputated—Andrei feels nothing but love for his former enemy and fellow man. Though Tolstoy colorfully renders the battle scenes of “War and Peace,” he still manages to make war seem insignificant. The book notably departs from its narrative at times to showcase its author’s meditation on history and the course of human affairs. Tolstoy’s conception of a historical process driven not by great figures but by the interplay of countless interconnected phenomena has influenced my own convictions about the world. Because the forward march of history is so incomprehensibly beyond our grasp, in Tolstoy’s telling, it seems to throw our own freedom into doubt. He writes in his epilogue...: “For history, freedom is only the expression of the unknown remainder of what we know about the laws of human life.” That’s a humbling thing to read after spending 1,000 pages living with these iconic literary figures. These books may well change the way you look at the world. The characters, settings and messages will stay with you for as long as you want them to. Mr. Schwalbe must have had Tolstoy in mind when he wrote that books “are uniquely suited to helping us change our relationship to the rhythms and habits of daily life.” It’s on that note that this humble editor recommends you read “War and Peace” and “Anna Karenina.” BCMT8/0fe4

Price: 89.99 USD

Location: Tucson, Arizona

End Time: 2024-09-28T21:04:59.000Z

Shipping Cost: 7.63 USD