Illustrated by Angela Barrett
Introduced by Helen Dunmore
Translated by Louise and Aylmer Maude
A high-society scandal rocks Moscow and St Petersburg in Leo Tolstoy’s masterpiece Anna Karenina. Angela Barrett illustrates this beautiful Folio collector’s edition, which is introduced by Helen Dunmore.
‘Tolstoy towered above his age as Dante and Michelangelo and Beethoven had done.’
- Sir Kenneth Clark
A simple and timeless story of a woman embarking on a passionate affair, Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina is widely regarded as one of the greatest love stories in literature. This beautiful Folio edition is a collector’s treasure that will be enjoyed by generations to come. Featuring the celebrated translation by Louise and Aylmer Maude, the cloth-bound book is illustrated with 14 of Angela Barrett’s atmospheric colour drawings and is introduced by award-winning poet and novelist Helen Dunmore.
From as early as 1870 Tolstoy had the idea of writing about a married woman of high society who lapses morally, but it wasn’t until he was moved by the suicide of a neighbouring landowner’s mistress that the author of War and Peace embarked on what would be his second great masterpiece.
Quarter-bound in buckram with blocked and printed cloth sides
Set in Ehrhardt with Bulmer display
Frontispiece and 14 full-page colour illustrations
768 pages
Plain slipcase
9½˝ × 6¼˝
Angela Barrett captures the characters’ emotional journeys, the splendour of the grand estates and the rawness of unforgiving Russian winters in 14 full-page colour illustrations, as well as creating a striking binding and endpaper designs. Bound in buckram and cloth, this collector’s edition of Tolstoy’s epic novel is further embellished with beautiful gold page tops. English translators Louise and Aylmer Maude were personal friends of Tolstoy, and their 1918 translation remains highly regarded. Here, it is introduced by poet and novelist Helen Dunmore. Winner of the Costa Book Award, Dunmore celebrates Tolstoy’s ‘profound and poetic’ novel, which sees him push the experiences of his female protagonist to the fore: ‘Her thoughts and feelings, her sensuous life and her inner existence, are far more memorable than Vronsky’s’.
Anna’s tale is universal; bored by her calculating husband and eager to experience life, rather than read about it in books, she falls in love. In Moscow and St Petersburg, such scandals are the stuff of gossip – not tragedy – but Anna refuses to play society’s game. Hers is a high passion and, though she tries to insist that her lover, Count Vronsky, shares it, he begins to dread the very word ‘love’ and to hanker after simpler pleasures. Anna’s ruinous affair is set against the backdrop of stories of other liaisons and marriages, as well as Tolstoy’s portrait of Russia in the latter part of the 19th century: drawing rooms, racetracks, officers’ clubs, forests and dachas are depicted in all their seductive glory as the setting for Anna’s doomed romance.
Louise Maude (born 1858) and Aylmer Maude (born 1855) met in Moscow and were married there in 1884. The English couple spent a number of years living in Russia and worked together translating the works of Leo Tolstoy. As friends of the author, they would pay him regular visits and got to know him well over the years. On moving to England, Aylmer Maude continued to correspond with Tolstoy and, during a visit to Russia in 1902, he was authorised to write his biography.
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