Creating Anna Karenina: Tolstoy and the Birth of Literature's Most Enigmatic Heroine by Bob Blaisdell
Creating Anna Karenina: Tolstoy and the Birth of Literature's Most Enigmatic Heroine by Bob Blaisdell
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 iconic 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 the self-conscious, robust, brooding Tolstoy depicted himself as Konstantin Levin, who in fact shares many of Tolstoy's biographical experiences. But in truth, it is within Anna that the intense consciousness and dynamic energy flow in the same complex depths as within Tolstoy. Her fateful suicide is the road that Tolstoy nearly traveled himself. Through Blaisdell's examination of the novel -- and its drafts -- as well as the voluminous correspondence between Tolstoy and his friends, editors, and family, we learn how Tolstoy's inner life and the development of his heroine intersect.
By turns a biography, an account of Tolstoy's creative processes, and the story of his relationship to the Russian literary world of the 1870s, Creating Anna Karenina will enthrall the thousands of readers whose lives have become deeper and clearer after experiencing this hallmark of world literature.
Pegasus Books, Hardcover, 1st Edition, 1st Printing, 2020
THIS IS A BRAND NEW BOOK.