&quot;The best novel ever written.&quot; &mdash;William Faulkner<br />&quot;A perfect work of art.&quot; &mdash;Fyodor Dostoyevsky<br />&quot;One of the greatest love stories in world literature.&quot; &mdash;Vladimir Nabokov<br /><br />Considered by some to be the greatest novel ever written, &ldquo;Anna Karenina&rdquo; is Tolstoy&#39;s classic tale of love and adultery set against the backdrop of high society in Moscow and Saint Petersburg. A rich and complex masterpiece, the novel charts the disastrous course of a love affair between Anna, a beautiful married woman, and Count Vronsky, a wealthy army officer. Tolstoy seamlessly weaves together the lives of dozens of characters, and in doing so captures a breathtaking tapestry of late-nineteenth-century Russian society. As Matthew Arnold wrote in his celebrated essay on Tolstoy, &ldquo;We are not to take Anna Karenina as a work of art; we are to take it as a piece of life.&rdquo;