[FIRST EDITION] - Anna Karenina

by TOLSTOY, Lev Nikolaevich.

$18,000 · Offered by Biblio

First edition

The first complete edition - and the first book edition - of the celebrated novel. A very good example, in contemporary bindings. Tolstoy started writing Anna Karenina in early 1873; in May 1873 he finished the first draft. Many drafts would follow: Tolstoy was searching for that perfect opening line, a perfect name for his heroine, perfectly balanced plot lines. In one of the drafts Anna is called Pushkina: Tolstoy gave her physical features of Pushkin's eldest daughter Maria ("the little wilful tendrils of her curly hair that would always break free about her neck and temples", hereafter trans. C.Garnett). Several drafts opened with a scene at a farm fair: Ordyntsev (future Levin) is exhibiting his livestock and by chance meets Alabin (future Stiva). In another draft, Tatiana (future Anna) leaves her husband for Balashov (future Vronsky), gets a divorce, but, unhappy in the company of her new dissolute friends, drowns herself in the Neva river. Eventually, Tolstoy came to choices that had made the novel just right. The opening line - "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way" – gave foundation for the famous "Anna Karenina principle" in social sciences, popularised by Jared Diamond in his 1997 book Guns, Germs and Steel. Psychoanalysts still use Anna's "stream of consciousness" before her suicide as a valid description of depression and narcissistic disorder (e.g. Neville Symington, Narcissism: A New Theory, 1993). Tolstoy's novel continu

• Publisher: T.Ris, Moskva, 1878
• Edition: First Edition

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