Author: Bob Blaisdell
Publisher: Pegasus Books
ISBN: 9781643134628
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 0
Get Book
Book Description
The story behind the origins of Anna Karenina and the turbulent life and times of Leo Tolstoy. Anna Karenina is one of the most nuanced characters in world literature and we return to her, and the novel she propels, again and again. Remarkably, there has not yet been an examination of Leo Tolstoy specifically through the lens of this novel. Critic and professor Bob Blaisdell unravels Tolstoy’s family, literary, and day-to-day life during the period that he conceived, drafted, abandoned, and revised Anna Karenina. In the process, we see where Tolstoy’s life and his art intersect in obvious and unobvious ways. Readers often assume that Tolstoy, a nobleman-turned-mystic would write himself into the principled Levin. But in truth, it is within Anna that the consciousness and energy flows with the same depth and complexities as Tolstoy. Her fateful suicide is the road that Tolstoy nearly traveled himself. At once a nuanced biography and portrait of the last decades of the Russian empire and artful literary examination, Creating Anna Karenina will enthrall the thousands of readers whose lives have become deeper and clearer after experiencing this hallmark of world literature.
Author: Gary Saul Morson
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 9780300100709
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 300
Get Book
Book Description
In this invigorating new assessment of Anna Karenina, Gary Saul Morson overturns traditional interpretations of the classic novel and shows why readers have misunderstood Tolstoy's characters and intentions. Morson argues that Tolstoy's ideas are far more radical than has been thought: his masterpiece challenges deeply held conceptions of romantic love, the process of social reform, modernization, and the nature of good and evil. By investigating the ethical, philosophical, and social issues with which Tolstoy grappled, Morson finds in Anna Karenina powerful connections with the concerns of today. He proposes that Tolstoy's effort to see the world more wisely can deeply inform our own search for wisdom in the present day. The book offers brilliant analyses of Anna, Karenin, Dolly, Levin, and other characters, with a particularly subtle portrait of Anna's extremism and self-deception. Morson probes Tolstoy's important insights (evil is often the result of negligence; goodness derives from small, everyday deeds) and completes the volume with an irresistible, original list of One Hundred and Sixty-Three Tolstoyan Conclusions.
Author: Jennifer Adams
Publisher: Gibbs Smith
ISBN: 1423634837
Category : Juvenile Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 22
Get Book
Book Description
Learn words associated with fashion as toddlers are introduced to Tolstoy's Anna Karenina.
Author: graf Leo Tolstoy
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 364
Get Book
Book Description
Author: Donna Tussing Orwin
Publisher: Simply Charly
ISBN: 1943657319
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 124
Get Book
Book Description
“This is a little gem, the best introduction to Tolstoy I have ever encountered, and it is more than that. The most accomplished scholar will find important new insights, the sort that one immediately recognizes as both true and profound. Orwin brings Tolstoy to life as a person and as a writer, and she also shows beautifully how the two are linked. The discussions of Tolstoy's views on psychology and the nature of art are especially illuminating.” —Gary Saul Morson, Lawrence B. Dumas Professor of the Arts and Humanities and Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures, Northwestern University Count Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910) was born at Yasnaya Polyana, his ancestral estate located about 120 miles from Moscow. While he would live and travel in other places over the years, he always considered this family residence in the Russian heartland as his home. His lifelong quest for truth and meaning began while he was a university student. Subsequent experiences as an artillery officer in the Caucasian and Crimean Wars, and time spent in St. Petersburg and Europe, broadened his perspective and profoundly influenced him. In Simply Tolstoy, Professor Donna Tussing Orwin traces the author’s profound journey of discovery and explains how he mined his tumultuous inner life to create his great works, including War and Peace, Anna Karenina and The Death of Ivan Ilych. She shows how these books, both fiction and nonfiction, are not autobiographical in the conventional sense, but function as snapshots of Tolstoy’s state of mind at specific points in his life. The story she tells is, inevitably, intertwined with the story of Russia, a country also in constant search of its identity. Mixing biography, literary analysis, and history, Simply Tolstoy is a satisfying read for those already familiar with the author’s work, as well as an accessible and thoroughly engaging introduction to a literary giant who was also a tireless and uncompromising seeker of truth.
Author: Bob Blaisdell
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1639362657
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 425
Get Book
Book Description
A revelatory portrait of Chekhov during the most extraordinary artistic surge of his life. In 1886, a twenty-six-year-old Anton Chekhov was publishing short stories, humor pieces, and articles at an astonishing rate, and was still a practicing physician. Yet as he honed his craft and continued to draw inspiration from the vivid characters in his own life, he found himself—to his surprise and ocassional embarassment—admired by a growing legion of fans, including Tolstoy himself. He had not yet succumbed to the ravages of tuberculosis. He was a lively, frank, and funny correspondant and a dedicated mentor. And as Bob Blaisdell discovers, his vivid articles, stories, and plays from this period—when read in conjunction with his correspondence—become a psychological and emotional secret diary. When Chekhov struggled with his increasingly fraught engagement, young couples are continually making their raucous way in and out of relationships on the page. When he was overtaxed by his medical duties, his doctor characters explode or implode. Chekhov’s talented but drunken older brothers and Chekhov’s domineering father became transmuted into characters, yet their emergence from their families serfdom is roiling beneath the surface. Chekhov could crystalize the human foiibles of the people he knew into some of the most memorable figures in literature and drama. In Chekhov Becomes Chekhov, Blaisdell astutely examines the psychological portraits of Chekhov's distinct, carefully observed characters and how they reflect back on their creator during a period when there seemed to be nothing between his imagination and the paper he was writing upon.
Author: Leo Tolstoy
Publisher: First Avenue Editions ™
ISBN: 1467787175
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 1256
Get Book
Book Description
The beautiful, intelligent Anna Karenina arrives in Moscow to counsel her sister-in-law, Dolly, whose husband, Stiva, has been cheating on her. Anna arrives on the same train as the military officer Count Alexey Vronsky, who falls in love with her, even though he is courting someone else and she is married and has a child. When Alexey and Anna begin a romantic relationship, Anna is rejected from society. Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, a novel of adultery and social politics, reveals the changing Russian culture of the 1870s. It was first published in book form in 1878 in Russia. This is an unabridged version of the English translation by Constance Garnett, published in 1901.
Author: Viv Groskop
Publisher: Abrams
ISBN: 1683353447
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 235
Get Book
Book Description
“In this hilarious, candid, and thought-provoking memoir, [Groskop] explains how she used lessons from Russian classics to understand herself better.” —Gretchen Rubin, #1 New York Times–bestselling author As Viv Groskop knows from personal experience, everything that has ever happened to a person has already happened in the Russian classics: from not being sure what to do with your life (Anna Karenina), to being hopelessly in love with someone who doesn’t love you back (Turgenev’s A Month in the Country), or being socially anxious about your appearance (all of Chekhov’s work). In The Anna Karenina Fix, a sort of literary self-help memoir, Groskop mines these and other works, as well as the lives of their celebrated creators, and her own experiences as a student of Russian, to answer the question “How should you live your life?” This is a charming and fiercely intelligent book, a love letter to Russian literature and an exploration of the answers these writers found to life’s questions. “[Groskop is] a delight, a reader’s reader whose professional and personal experiences have allowed her to write the kind of book that not only is complete unto itself, but makes you want to head to the library and revisit or discover the great works she loves.” —The Washington Post “Learn how to hack life nineteenth-century Russian style! You’ll totally be like Anna Karenina without getting (spoiler alert) run over by a train!” —Gary Shteyngart, New York Times-bestselling author “For anyone intimidated by Russia’s daunting literary heritage, this humorous yet thoughtful introduction will serve as the perfect entrée.” —Publishers Weekly
Author: Carmen Boullosa
Publisher: Coffee House Press
ISBN: 1566895855
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 145
Get Book
Book Description
Russia, 1905. Behind the gates of the Karenin Palace, Sergei, son of Anna Karenina, meets Tolstoy in his dreams and finds reminders of his mother everywhere: the almost-living portrait that the Tsar intends to acquire and the opium-infused manuscripts she wrote just before her death, one of which opens a trapdoor to a wild feminist fairytale. Across the city, Clementine, an anarchist seamstress, and Father Gapón, the charismatic leader of the proletariat, tip the country ever closer to revolution. Boullosa lifts the voices of coachmen, sailors, maids, and seamstresses in this playful, polyphonic, and subversive revision of the Russian revolution, told through the lens of Tolstoy’s most beloved work.
Author: Leo Tolstoy
Publisher: Quirk Books
ISBN: 1594744831
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 548
Get Book
Book Description
Leo Tolstoy meets robots in this “creepy, thrilling, and highly enjoyable” sci-fi mashup of the classic Russian novel Anna Karenina (Library Journal). “ . . . lives up to its promise to make Tolstoy ‘awesomer.’”—The Onion AV Club It’s been called the greatest novel ever written. Now, Tolstoy’s timeless saga of love and betrayal is transported to an awesomer version of 19th-century Russia. It is a world humming with high-powered groznium engines: where debutantes dance the 3D waltz in midair, mechanical wolves charge into battle alongside brave young soldiers, and robots—miraculous, beloved robots!—are the faithful companions of everyone who’s anyone. Restless to forge her own destiny in this fantastic modern life, the bold noblewoman Anna and her enigmatic Android Karenina abandon a loveless marriage to seize passion with the daring, handsome Count Vronsky. But when their scandalous affair gets mixed up with dangerous futuristic villainy, the ensuing chaos threatens to rip apart their lives, their families, and—just maybe—all of planet Earth.
