Anna Karenina

Considered by some to be the greatest novel ever written <i>Anna Karenina</i> is Tolstoy's classic tale of love and adultery set against the backdrop of high society in Moscow and Saint Petersburg. A rich and complex masterpiece the novel charts the disastrous course of a love affair between Anna a beautiful married woman and Count Vronsky a wealthy army officer. Tolstoy seamlessly weaves together the lives of dozens of characters and in doing so captures a breathtaking tapestry of late-nineteenth-century Russian society. As Matthew Arnold wrote in his celebrated essay on Tolstoy &quot;We are not to take <i>Anna Karenina</i> as a work of art; we are to take it as a piece of life.&quot;