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Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
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Anna Karenina

$31.49

Get for $14.99 with membership
Narrator Lorna Raver
Length 39 hours 43 minutes
Language English
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Vladimir Nabokov called Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina "one of the greatest love stories in world literature." Set in imperial Russia, Anna Karenina is a rich and complex meditation on passionate love and disastrous infidelity.



Married to a powerful government minister, Anna Karenina is a beautiful woman who falls deeply in love with a wealthy army officer, the elegant Count Vronsky. Desperate to find truth and meaning in her life, she rashly defies the conventions of Russian society and leaves her husband and son to live with her lover. Condemned and ostracized by her peers and prone to fits of jealousy that alienate Vronsky, Anna finds herself unable to escape an increasingly hopeless situation.



Set against this tragic affair is the story of Konstantin Levin, a melancholy landowner whom Tolstoy based largely on himself. While Anna looks for happiness through love, Levin embarks on his own search for spiritual fulfillment through marriage, family, and hard work. Surrounding these two central plot threads are dozens of characters whom Tolstoy seamlessly weaves together, creating a breathtaking tapestry of nineteenth-century Russian society.



From its famous opening sentenceโ€”"Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way"โ€”to its stunningly tragic conclusion, this enduring tale of marriage and adultery plumbs the very depths of the human soul.

Leo Tolstoy was born in 1828 at Yasnaya Polyana in central Russia and educated privately. He studied Oriental languages and law at the University of Kazan, then led a life of dissipation until 1851, when he went to the Caucasus and joined an artillery regiment. He took part in the Crimean War, and on the basis of this experience wrote The Sevastopol Stories, which confirmed his tenuous reputation as a writer. After a period in St. Petersburg and abroad, where he studied educational methods for use in his school for peasant children at Yasnaya Polyana, Tolstoy married Sofya Behrs in 1862. The next fifteen years was a period of great happiness: the couple had thirteen children, and Tolstoy managed his estates, continued his educational projects, and wrote War and Peace and Anna Karenina. A Confession marked a spiritual crisis in Tolstoy's life; he became an extreme moralist, and in a series of pamphlets written after 1880, he expressed his rejection of state and church, indictment of the weaknesses of the flesh, and denunciation of private property. He published his last novel, Resurrection, in 1900. Tolstoy's teaching earned him many followers at home and abroad, but also much opposition, and in 1901 he was excommunicated by the Russian Orthodox Church. He died in 1910.

Lorna Raver has been named a Best Voice of the Year by AudioFile magazine and has been nominated for Audie Awards for her readings of Washington Square by Henry James, Nothing with Strings by Bailey White, and Marion Zimmer Bradley's Ravens of Avalon by Diana L. Paxson. She has also received numerous AudioFile Earphones Awards for her narrations. An accomplished stage actress, Lorna has also guest-starred in many top television series, and she stars in director Sam Raimi's film Drag Me to Hell.

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