Anna Karenina.

TOLSTOY, Leo. (Count Lyof N Tolstoi).

Item Number: 3992

New York: Thomas J. Crowell & Co, 1886.

First edition in English. Octavo, original brown cloth, with gilt titles and tooling to the spine and front panel. In very good condition, with Frederick W. Bancroft’s signature dated 1888 to the title page. Translated by Nathan Haskell Dole. Housed in a custom half morocco clamshell box.

Vladimir Nabokov called Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina "one of the greatest love stories in world literature." Matthew Arnold claimed it was not so much a work of art as "a piece of life." Set in imperial Russia, Anna Karenina is a rich and complex meditation on passionate love and disastrous infidelity. First issued serially in 1873; first published in book form in Moscow in 1878.