Leo Tolstoy’s Timeless Novel, Anna Karenina

The end of November, 2012 was marked in the USA by the release of the new version of “Anna Karenina.” Director of the film, Joe Wright, adopts Leo Tolstoy’s novel with the identical name. Although, a novel “Anna Karenina” “has traveled to the big screen dozens of times, from a handful of silent films dating to the birth of cinema to a 1997 English language version starring French actress Sophie Marceau” (Siegel, 2012p. 2), nonetheless this tragic love story still remains relevant to the present day. What criteria makes the Tolstoy’s novel “Anna Karenina” so popular during the 135 years? What's the ideas the author Leo Tolstoy put into that makes it popular?

The author, Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910) is one of the famous novelists in Russian literature and best known for two novels “War and Peace” and “Anna Karenina.” Tolstoy’s realism of his fictions focus “chiefly on the outward physical aspects of human life” (Radley, 2013, p. 4). He is a master of the “psychophysical- that is the depiction of the inner selves of his characters through carefully honed descriptions of their physical being” (Radley, 2013, p. 4). His literature works vacillate between the “war and peace, moralism and neutrality” (Radley, 2013, p. 4). Even more than 180 years after his birth, Tolstoy remains “a vital force in world literature” (Radley, 2010, p. 4).

Tolstoy’s life was long and eventful. He was born in an honorable old aristocratic family in 1828, at the estate of Yasnaya Polyana, where he lived all his life, wrote all the literature works, and also was buried there. He lost his parents at an early age. His mother, Princess Marya Volkonsky, died before his second birthday; his father, retired lieutenant-colonel, the country gentleman with “little inter...

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Tolstoy, L. (1877). Anna Karenina. PlanetPdf.com Retrieved from http://www.planetpdf.com