(Imagine my childish glee when I saw this portrait used for the cover of this book in the edition I chose!) Actually, it was "A Stranger" by Ivan Kramskoy (1883) - but for me it has always remained the mysterious and beautiful Anna Karenina, the femme fatale of Russian literature. "Who's that?" I asked my grandpa when I was five, and without missing a beat he answered, "Anna Karenina". A young beautiful mysterious woman sitting in a carriage in wintry Moscow and looking at the viewer through her heavy-lidded eyes with a stare that combines allure and deep sadness. My grandpa had an old print of a painting hanging in his garage. I must have ingested the knowledge with my mother's milk, as Russians would say. His ideas on nonviolent resistance, expressed in such works as The Kingdom of God Is Within You, were to have a profound impact on such pivotal twentieth-century figures as Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr.Īs a daughter of a Russian literature teacher, it seems I have always known the story of Anna Karenina: the love, the affair, the train - the whole shebang. His literal interpretation of the ethical teachings of Jesus, centering on the Sermon on the Mount, caused him in later life to become a fervent Christian anarchist and anarcho-pacifist. Tolstoy is equally known for his complicated and paradoxical persona and for his extreme moralistic and ascetic views, which he adopted after a moral crisis and spiritual awakening in the 1870s, after which he also became noted as a moral thinker and social reformer. Many consider Tolstoy to have been one of the world's greatest novelists. His two most famous works, the novels War and Peace and Anna Karenina, are acknowledged as two of the greatest novels of all time and a pinnacle of realist fiction. Later in life, he also wrote plays and essays. Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy (Russian: Лев Николаевич Толстой most appropriately used Liev Tolstoy commonly Leo Tolstoy in Anglophone countries) was a Russian writer who primarily wrote novels and short stories.
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