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Anna Karenina
9Leo Tolstoy
Tolstoy's other masterpiece — a portrait of adultery, family, and faith whose opening sentence is the most famous first line in fiction.
GBM Assessment (Score: 9/10)
Anna Karenina opens with a famous sentences in world literature — "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way" — and proceeds to develop a double narrative of exceptional psychological and moral complexity. Leo Tolstoy interweaves the tragic story of Anna's adulterous passion and social ruin with the spiritual quest of Levin, creating a novel that William Faulkner called "the best novel yet written."
Crafted during the period of Russia's Great Reforms and published in 1877, Anna Karenina explores the tensions between personal desire and social convention, faith and reason, rural authenticity and urban corruption with a depth and subtlety that have never been surpassed. The novel has been adapted for film with iconic performances by Greta Garbo in 1935 and Keira Knightley in 2012, and it has inspired operatic treatments as well.
Germany & Russia, 1876-1877
Wagner premieres the Ring cycle at Bayreuth — 16 hours that redefine opera and influence everything from Tolkien to Star Wars. Tolstoy publishes Anna Karenina. Edison invents the phonograph.
Awards & Adaptations
Films (Garbo 1935; Knightley 2012). Operas.
Recommended Edition
Pevear & Volokhonsky (2000); L. & A. Maude (1918)
