Creating Anna Karenina: Tolstoy and the Birth of Literature's Most Enigmatic Heroine

(Hardback)

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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 Tolstoys family, literary, and day-to-day life during the period that he conceived, drafted, abandoned, and revisedAnna Karenina. In the process, we see where Tolstoys 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 Kareninawill enthrall the thousands of readers whose lives have become deeper and clearer after experiencing this hallmark of world literature.

Reviews

"That Creating Anna Karenina is a major contribution to Tolstoy scholarship makes it no less of a delight to read. Blaisdell's passion for the subject, and his always-surprising discoveries about the great man and his creation, kept me turning the pages unstoppably. This is a wonderful book." -- Ian Frazier, author of Travels in Siberia, staff writer at The New Yorker
Captivating.How did Anna Karenina evolve from a trivial high-society adulteress, whom Tolstoy despised, into one of the deepest, most sensitive tragic heroines in all of literature What happened inside Tolstoy to condition this metamorphosisCreating Anna Kareninais a worthy companion to the novel. -- Janet Fitch * Los Angeles Review of Books *
In its study of the comings and goings of the Tolstoy household at the time of the novels composition,Creating Anna Kareninaasks if one of the worlds greatest novels was in fact just as much a product of everyday minutialike who stops by for a visit with what kind of gossip to tellas it was the culmination of long-simmering ideas about morality and desire. * The New Republic *
A fuller understanding of any workand especially of its creationrequires the resurrection of its creator and his milieu. Blaisdell manages to do precisely that. -- Boris Dralyuk, Executive Editor, Los Angeles Review of Books, from the Foreword
"Despite scores of biographies in dozens of languages, we know remarkably little about Tolstoy in the 1870s, a decade when the writer conceived and wroteAnna Karenina, one of the worlds best-know and best-loved novels. InCreating Anna Karenina, Bob Blaisdell is the first to provide a granular, stop-action, magnifying-glass-level look at the creation of this astonishingly great book; Blaisdell conjures the novelists world, and painstakingly reveals the overlaps with the world of the novel. Tolstoy breathed in his world, and exhaled the novel." -- Professor Michael Denner, Editor of Tolstoy Studies Journal
A riveting account of Tolstoys composition of Anna Karenina. Tolstoy comes to life as a complex individual defying easy classification. Tolstoys fans will relish learning from, and, occasionally, arguing with Blaisdells opinions. This passionate book is almost impossible to put down. * Publishers Weekly *

Author Bio

Bob Blaisdellis Professor of English at the City University of New Yorks Kingsborough College and the author ofCreating Anna Karenina. He is a reviewer for theSan Francisco Chronicle,theLos Angeles Review of Books,The Christian Science Monitor, and the editor of more than three dozen Dover literature and poetry collections, including a collection of Chekhov's love stores. He lives in New York City.