Leo Tolstoy, Translated By Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky
Leo Tolstoy’s novel about love and life is as poignant today as ever. Anna’s stormy affair with Count Vronsky speaks to today’s world of unhappy marriages and struggles of divorce. While Levin pushes through the hurtles life sets down before him, as well as those he sets down for himself in a struggle to find happiness. No character is one-dimensional in Tolstoy’s Russia. Marriage for love is a concept that has really only been employed in a large scale for a few hundred years and Tolstoy shows us that the struggles we endure in the name of love today are nothing new, his characters are caught between social tradition and popular ideas and they can teach us all something.