Anna Karenina.

TOLSTOI, Count Leo Nikolayevich. [Leo Tolstoy] [Ernest Shackleton].

Item Number: 95357

London: Walter Scott, 1889.

Ernest Shackleton’s copy of Tolstoy’s masterpiece with his ownership signature to the pastedown of each volume. Octavo, 2 volumes, original cloth with gilt titles and tooling to the spine and front panel. Shackleton’s biographer Roland Huntford notes that Shackleton retrieved a copy of Anna Karenina from the Endurance with a few other books before the ship was destroyed. Introduction by Nathan Haskell Dole. In very good condition with light rubbing to the extremities. From the library of Ernest Shackleton. An exceptional association.

Vladimir Nabokov called Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina "one of the greatest love stories in world literature." Matthew Arnold claimed it was not so much a work of art as "a piece of life." Set in imperial Russia, Anna Karenina is a rich and complex meditation on passionate love and disastrous infidelity. First issued serially in 1873; first published in book form in Moscow in 1878. Upon first reading it, Dostoyevsky wrote: “Anna Karenina is sheer perfection as a work of art. No European work of fiction of our present day comes anywhere near it.”