Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

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Anna Karenina

was regarded by Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy as his first genuine novel. Arriving midway between Flaubert's

Madame Bovary

(1857) and Fontane's

Effi Briest

(1895), it stands as perhaps the most prominent nineteenth-century European novel of adultery; but it is, both in reality and in reputation, rather more than that. F.R. Leavis, for example, regarded Tolstoy as “an incomparably representative European” and

Anna Karenina

as “surely,

the

European novel”. Other prominent cultural commentators to have singled out this work for special attention include Matthew Arnold, Harold Bloom, D.H. Lawrence, Thomas Mann, Vladimir Nabokov (who always insisted on anglicising the title slightly, to “Anna Karenin”), Lionel Trilling and Virginia Woolf, as well as Georg Lukács, and…

1764 words

Citation: Cornwell, Neil. "Anna Karenina". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 21 June 2004 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=6589, accessed 19 March 2024.]

6589 Anna Karenina 3 Historical context notes are intended to give basic and preliminary information on a topic. In some cases they will be expanded into longer entries as the Literary Encyclopedia evolves.

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