Anna Karenina (1877)

Tolstoy draws a vast panorama of the complex psychological developments of the protagonists set in the pre-revolutionary late 19th Century Russian Aristocratic society to which he himself belonged. The protagonists are composite portraits of the persons around him: friends and acquaintances, his family. With penetrating perception Tolstoy records the shades of meaning expressed in their words, their hidden thoughts.
Anna breaking out of a dull marriage, then clinging in her love to Vronsky - „caring for nothing but his caresses“ (VII-30, 796) reminded me of Don José, not understanding that ‘L’amour est un oiseau rebelle’ ; Vronsky begins to feel that the fulfilment of his desires did not bring him the expected happiness. „It showed him the eternal error men make in imagining that happiness consists in the realisation of their desires.“ (V-8, S. 490)

Levin - largely a self-portrait - agonising: If you don’t have the consolation of a firm believe in a merciful god, how do you live? (VIII-9, 823), asking the unanswerable: „What am I? Where am I? And why am I here?“ (VIII-11, 827) as Gauguin will ask 20 years later in 1898: „Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?“, questions inherent in most if no all works of serious art.
The book demands to be read again, one reading will hardly do it justice. I will find a different translation next time.

James Meek: ‘Of all the scenes in the book the one most resembling the later life of the Tolstoys is not a Levin-Kitty scene, but the final row between Vronsky and Anna just before she goes out to throw herself under a train.’:
(https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v32/n14/james-meek/some-wild-creature )

From all the thousand and more cover pictures this image of the sledge in front of the St. Petersburg Palace I prefer most; the title is also well integrated.

The text by Rosemary Edmonds is worth reading, not as an introduction but afterwards. (V-20)

Meisterhaft! ( )