Anna Karenina.

TOLSTOY, Leo. (Count Lyof N Tolstoi). Translated by Nathan Haskell Dole.

Item Number: 106332

New York: Thomas J. Crowell & Co, 1886.

First edition in English of Tolstoy’s masterpiece. Octavo, original brown cloth, with gilt titles and tooling to the spine and front panel, patterned endpapers. Introduction by Nathan Haskell Dole. In very good condition. Housed in a custom half morocco clamshell box.

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.”