Throughout, Blaisdell uses letters, journals, and memoirs to show how Tolstoy's own life story was woven into the fabric of Anna Karenina. Blaisdell's primary strength lies in going granular: he focuses intently on the years from late 1872 through early 1878, during which Tolstoy conceived, outlined, began, abandoned, picked up, abandoned again, and finally completed a masterpiece he disliked (an 'abomination'). 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.īlaisdell, an editor of Dover prose and poetry collections, offers a riveting account of Tolstoy's composition of Anna Karenina.

Her fateful suicide is the road that Tolstoy nearly traveled himself. But in truth, it is within Anna that the consciousness and energy flows with the same depth and complexities as Tolstoy. Readers often assume that Tolstoy, a nobleman-turned-mystic would write himself into the principled Levin. In the process, we see where Tolstoy’s life and his art intersect in obvious and unobvious ways. 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. Remarkably, there has not yet been an examination of Leo Tolstoy specifically through the lens of this novel. The story behind the origins of Anna Karenina and the turbulent life and times of Leo Tolstoy.Īnna Karenina is one of the most nuanced characters in world literature and we return to her, and the novel she propels, again and again.

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