The novel Anna Karenina was published by Count Leo Tolstoy in 1878. It tells the story of an adulterous affair between Anna, a respectably married upper-class woman, and a young army officer, Count Vronsky.
Anna, torn between duty and passion, cannot resist the latter and is drawn to her destruction. It is also the story of Count Levin, a character in no small part based on Tolstoy himself, struggling in his estate with the forces of tradition and progress, idealism and pragmatism.
Capturing the state of Russia, Anna Karenina was an immediate success and is considered by many the greatest novel ever written. Rosamund Bartlett has written a biography of Tolstoy and has translated Anna Karenina.
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Links:
https://profilebooks.com/work/tolstoy/
https://global.oup.com/academic/product/anna-karenina-9780198748847
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The Canon Club is a show about the Western canon: the great cultural inheritance we're handed, across music, art, and literature.
It was born of a blog by Ed West, in which he pined for a return to the schools of art and literary appreciation that were so famous in pre-WWI Vienna.
An era when people took seriously their commitment to appreciating the art that had come before them: from Beowulf to The Divine Comedy, from Goya to Beethoven, from Brahms to Ibsen.
This podcast is that latter-day Viennese salon.
The Western canon is everyone's birthright, even if most of us feel under-educated in it. Paul and Ed have set out to reclaim it for themselves, and thereby transmit it to a wider audience.
Ed West is a prominent British journalist, and the author of the wildly popular Wrong Side of History Substack.
Paul Morland is an expert in demographics, and the author of several books.
In Season One, they'll be inducting one person or movement per episode into The Canon:
E01: Caravaggio with Andrew Graham Dixon
E02: Macbeth with Neema Parvini
E03: Anton Bruckner with Bryan Gilliam
E04: Anna Karenina with Rosamund Bartlett
E05: The Romanesque with John McNeill
E06: Thomas Mann with Tobias Boes
E07: Van Gogh with Martin Gayford