Anna Karenina: Library Edition (The Complete Classics)

Product Description<br/><br/><br/>Anna Karenina is beautiful, married to a successful man, and has a son whom she adores. But a chance meeting at a train station in Moscow sets her passionate heart alight, and she is defenseless in the face of Count Vronsky’s adoration. Having defied the rules of nineteenth-century Russian society, Anna is forced to pay a heavy price. Human nature, with all its failings, is the fabric of which this great and intense work is composed. Anna Karenina has been described as the perfect Russian novel.<br/><br/><br/>Review<br/><br/><br/>"Tolstoy's great novel portrays a tragic love affair against a backdrop of nineteenth-century Russian high society and country life. Kate Lock's treatment shows impressive range and facility, at times achieving remarkable power and poignancy. She skillfully provides a wide variety of voices--often indicating men just by changing intonation and pitch--and manages to convey Anna's loveliness by voice alone, giving her a kind of bell-like throatiness. Unfortunately, some of her male voices--indicated by roughening or straining her voice--are unconvincing. But any flaws are swallowed up by the magnitude of the work--Tolstoy's and hers--and by her predominant talent and deft touch."-- "AudioFile"<br/><br/><br/>About the Author<br/><br/><br/>Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910) was born about two hundred miles from Moscow. His mother died when he was two, his father when he was nine. His parents were of noble birth, and Tolstoy remained acutely aware of his aristocratic roots, even when he later embraced doctrines of equality and the brotherhood of man. After serving in the army in the Caucasus and Crimea, where he wrote his first stories, he traveled and studied educational theories. In 1862 he married Sophia Behrs and for the next fifteen years lived a tranquil, productive life, finishing<br/>War and Peace in 1869 and<br/>Anna Karenina in 1877. In 1879 he underwent a spiritual crisis; he sought to propagate his beliefs on faith, morality, and nonviolence, writing mostly parables, tracts, and morality plays. Tolstoy died of pneumonia in 1910 at the age of eighty-two.<br/><br/><br/><br/>Kate Lock has played Mrs. Linde in The Doll's House, Celia in Captain Oates Left Sock, and several leading roles at the Orange Tree Theatre in Richmond. She co-wrote Tuesday's Child with Terry Johnson and in it played Teresa Doyle at Theatre Royal, Stratford, and for the BBC. She has also appeared in several television productions, including Ayckbourn's Absent Friends, Coronation Street, The Brief, The Bill, and Sweet Nothings, as well as comedy sketches with Rory Bremner, Hale and Pace, and Morecambe & Wise.