Time Volume 15 (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1886 edition. Excerpt: ... the front rank of contemporary fiction. The title-character appeals strongly to the sympathy of the reader. Still young, possessed of grace and beauty, and endowed with great qualities of mind and heart, Anna Karenina, at the commencement of the story, has been married some ten years to Aleksei Aleksandrovitch Karenin, a very important political personage, old enough to be her father, absorbed in the duties of his department and the pursuit of his ambition, --in the words of his wife, "a ministerial machine," full of himself, and incapable of deep feeling towards others. Yet it is diflicult to conceive that a woman of so high a type as this St. Petersburg grands dame would, in the circumstances, be moved to passionate infatuation and her own undoing by so ordinary a man as the young cavalry captain, Count Vronsky At any rate, it is almost impossible to believe that such a woman would at once and unresistingly accept his advances. But, as George Eliot says: "The great problem of the shifting relation between passion and duty is clear to no man who is capable of apprehending it." Anna Karenina, however, has less afiinity with the characters of George Eliot, desirous to conform their passions, as Maggie Tulliver says: "To all the motives that sanctify our lives," than with the instinct-led heroines of Thomas Hardy's novels. Less tragic in their issue than the relations of Anna and Vrosky, the afiairs of Levin and Ekaterina afford very delightful reading. The latter, familiarly called Kitty, had refused Levin in the belief that Vronsky, who had not yet met Anna. Karenina, was seeking her hand; and in the chapters which relate their subsequent meeting, courtship, and early married life we...