Tolstoy and the Birth of Literature's Most Enigmatic Heroine
by Bob Blaisdell
Critics' Opinion:
Readers' rating:
Published Aug 2020
400 pages
Genre: Biography/Memoir
Publication Information
The story behind the origins of Anna Karenina and the turbulent life and times of Leo Tolstoy.
Anna Karenina is one of the most nuanced characters in world literature and we return to her, and the novel she propels, again and again. Remarkably, there has not yet been an examination of Leo Tolstoy specifically through the lens of this novel.
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. In the process, we see where Tolstoy's life and his art intersect in obvious and unobvious ways.
Readers often assume that Tolstoy, a nobleman-turned-mystic would write himself into the principled Levin. But in truth, it is within Anna that the consciousness and energy flows with the same depth and complexities as Tolstoy. Her fateful suicide is the road that Tolstoy nearly traveled himself.
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.
16 pages of B&W photographs
"[A] riveting account of Tolstoy's composition of Anna Karenina...Tolstoy's fans will relish learning from, and, occasionally, arguing with Blaisdell's opinions. This passionate book is almost impossible to put down." - Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"While some general readers may find the exegesis of the novel to be overkill, the author makes it personal and interesting enough to overcome that minor flaw. A revelatory portrait of a towering writer." - Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"That Creating Anna Karenina is a major contribution to Tolstoy scholarship makes it no less of a delight to read. Blaisdell's passion for the subject, and his always-surprising discoveries about the great man and his creation, kept me turning the pages unstoppably. This is a wonderful book." - Ian Frazier, author of Travels in Siberia, staff writer at the New Yorker
"A fuller understanding of any work—and especially of its creation—requires the resurrection of its creator and his milieu. Blaisdell manages to do precisely that." - Boris Dralyuk, executive editor, Los Angeles Review of Books, from the foreword
"Despite scores of biographies in dozens of languages, we know remarkably little about Tolstoy in the 1870s, a decade when the writer conceived and wrote Anna Karenina, one of the world's best-know and best-loved novels. In Creating Anna Karenina, Bob Blaisdell is the first to provide a granular, stop-action, magnifying-glass-level look at the creation of this astonishingly great book; Blaisdell conjures the novelist's world, and painstakingly reveals the overlaps with the world of the novel. Tolstoy breathed in his world, and exhaled the novel." - Professor Michael Denner, editor of Tolstoy Studies Journal
This information about Creating Anna Karenina was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Bob Blaisdell is Professor of English at the City University of New York's Kingsborough College. He is a reviewer for the San Francisco Chronicle, the Los Angeles Review of Books, the Christian Science Monitor, and the editor of more than three dozen Dover literature and poetry collections. He lives in New York City.
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