Anna Karenina

Widely regarded as a pinnacle in realist fiction, Anna Karenina recounts St. Petersburg aristocrat Anna Karenina's life story at the backdrop of the late-19th-century feudal Russian society. Having considered War and Peace not a novel, Tolstoy considered Anna Karenina his first true novel. Fyodor Dostoyevsky declared it "e;flawless as a work of art."e; His opinion was shared by Vladimir Nabokov, who especially admired "e;the flawless magic of Tolstoy's style,"e; and by William Faulkner, who described the novel as "e;the best ever written."e; The novel remains popular, as demonstrated by a 2007 poll of 125 contemporary authors in Time, which declared that Anna Karenina is the "e;greatest book ever written."e;