Anna Karenina (Signet Classic)

Anna Karenina was begun in 1873, seven years after the publication of War & Peace, and appeared in installments from 1875-1877. It's one of Tolstoy's masterpieces, written at the height of his power and reflecting almost every aspect of his method and attitudes.<br/><br/>Set in the period following the Emancipation of the Serfs in 1861, a time of intense social change, it's the story of a woman who refuses to be fettered by social conventions, the wife of a government bureaucrat who falls in love with a rich army officer and leaves husband and child for her lover: As Matthew Arnold wrote, "We are not to take 'Anna Karenina' as a work of art; we are to take it as a piece of life."