Books with author Constance Garnett

Anna Karenina is widely regarded to be an even greater achievement of tragedy and of the novel form than War and Peace had been the decade before. Tolstoy began writing it in 1873 and concluded it in 1877. It was published in serial installments from 1875 to 1877. It is the story of a fashionable married woman, Anna Karenina, who arrives from St Petersberg to meet Stepan Arkadyevitch but meets with him another man. Anna Karenina seems to have everything - beauty, wealth, popularity and an adored son. But she feels that her life is empty until the moment she encounters the impetuous officer Count Vronsky. Their subsequent affair scandalizes society and family alike and soon brings jealously and bitterness in its wake. Contrasting with this tale of love and self-destruction is the vividly observed story of Levin, a man striving to find contentment and a meaning to his life - and also a self-portrait of Tolstoy himself.

On the Eve is the third novel by famous Russian writer Ivan Turgenev, best known for his short stories and the novel Fathers and Sons. Turgenev embellishes this love story with observations on middle class life and interposes some art and philosophy. In his essay "When Will the Real Day Come?", Nikolay Dobrolyubov analyzed On the Eve through a political lens that Turgenev disagreed with, offending the author.

Anton Chekhov (1860-1904) was a master of the short story. The son of a former serf in southern Russia, he attended Moscow University to study medicine, writing short stories for periodicals in order to support his family. What began as a necessity became a legitimate career in 1886 when he was asked to write in St. Petersburg for the Novoye Vremya (New Times), owned by millionaire magnate Alexey Suvorin. Chekhov began paying more attention to his writing, revising and developing his own principles and conceptions of truth, for a time coming under the influence of Leo Tolstoy. As a result of his widespread popularity, Chekhov amassed a vast collection of short stories displaying an early use of stream-of-consciousness writing, as well as his powerful ideas concerning the individual, the tedium of life, and the beauty nature and humanity. This edition contains many stories, including "Ward No. 6," "The Looking-Glass," "The Beggar," "Darkness," "An Avenger," "A Happy Man," and "A Troublesome Visitor."

The Lady with the Dog and Other Stories is a collection of famous Russian short stories by Chekhov. “The Lady with the Dog,” which is the centerpiece of this collection, plays a romantic page-turning life of Dmitri, a Russian Banker who, while in a vacation in Yalta, meets a young lady named Anna, who loves to wander along the shore with her pet dog. This is a tale of a strong emotional passion that changes the lives of two people.

"The Chorus Girl and Other Stories" is a classic collection of short stories by short story master Anton Chekhov. Included here in this volume are the following tales: The Chorus Girl, Verotchka, My Life, At a Country House, A Father, On the Road, Rothschild's Fiddle, Ivan Matveyitch, Zinotchka, Bad Weather, A Gentleman Friend, and A Trivial Incident.

From the preface: WHEN Litvinov was torn loose from his "far from gay or complicated" life, caught up in a lurid passion in which he was never at home, and then abandoned, he fled upon the train. At first he was exhausted by the prodigious effort of will he had made; then a kind of composure came upon him. He "was hardened." The train, the minutes, were carrying him away from the wreck of his life. "He took to gazing out of the window. The day was gray and damp; there was no rain, but the fog held on, and low-lying clouds veiled the sky. The wind was blowing in the contrary direction to the course of the train; whitish clouds of steam, now alone, now mingled with other, darker clouds, of smoke, swept, in an endless series, past the window beside which Litvinov sat. He began to watch the steam, the smoke. Incessantly whirling, rising and falling, twisting and catching at the grass, at the bushes, playing pranks, as it were, lengthening and melting, puff followed puff,... they were constantly changing and yet remained the same... a monotonous, hurried, tiresome game! Sometimes the wind changed, the road made a turn--the whole mass suddenly disappeared, and immediately became visible through the opposite window; then, once more, the hugh train flung itself over, and once more veiled from Litvinov the wide view of the Rhine Valley. He gazed and gazed, and a strange reflection occurred to him.... He was alone in the carriage; there was no one to interfere with him. 'Smoke, smoke'--he repeated several times in succession; and suddenly everything appeared to him to be smoke--everything, his own life, everything pertaining to men, especially everything Russian. Every thing is smoke and steam, he thought;--everything seems to be constantly undergoing change; every where there are new forms, phenomenon follows phenomenon, but in reality everything is exactly alike; everything is hurrying, hastening somewhither--and everything vanishes without leaving a trace, without having attained to any end whatever; another breeze has begun to blow--and everything has been flung to the other side, and there, again, is the same incessant, agitated--and useless game. He recalled many things which had taken place, with much sound and clatter, before his eyes the last few years.. 'smoke,' he murmured,--'smoke.'" "Smoke." This is not only Litvinov's reaction from experiences too terrible for his mind and heart to stand--and also his consolation--but it is Turgenev's own reaction to life. The profound disillusion following the failure of the Revolutionary movement of '48, which swept over the intellectuals of Europe, had also its characteristic repercussion among the intellectual youth of Russia, and made a generation like the later generation so well portrayed by Tchekov--the men of the '80s, and also like the Intelligentsia after the failure of the Revolution of 1905.

Anna Karenina is a novel by the Russian writer Leo Tolstoy, published in serial installments from 1875 to 1877 in the periodical The Russian Messenger. Tolstoy clashed with editor Mikhail Katkov over political issues that arose in the final installment (Tolstoy's negative views of Russian volunteers going to fight in Serbia); therefore, the novel's first complete appearance was in book form in 1878.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 "flawless as a work of art." His opinion was shared by Vladimir Nabokov, who especially admired "the flawless magic of Tolstoy's style," and by William Faulkner, who described the novel as "the best ever written." The novel remains popular, as demonstrated by a 2007 poll of 125 contemporary authors in Time, which declared that Anna Karenina is the "greatest book ever written".Anna Karenina is the tragic story of a married aristocrat/socialite and her affair with the affluent Count Vronsky. The story opens when she arrives in the midst of a family broken up by her brother's unbridled womanizing—something that prefigures her own later situation, though she would experience less tolerance by others.A bachelor, Vronsky is eager to marry her if she will agree to leave her husband Karenin, a senior government official, but she is vulnerable to the pressures of Russian social norms, the moral laws of the Russian Orthodox Church, her own insecurities, and Karenin's indecision. Although Vronsky and Anna go to Italy, where they can be together, they have trouble making friends. Back in Russia, she is shunned, becoming further isolated and anxious, while Vronsky pursues his social life. Despite Vronsky's reassurances, she grows increasingly possessive and paranoid about his imagined infidelity, fearing loss of control.A parallel story within the novel is that of Konstantin Levin, a wealthy country landowner who wants to marry Princess Kitty, sister to Dolly and sister-in-law to Anna's brother Oblonsky. Konstantin has to propose twice before Kitty accepts. The novel details Konstantin's difficulties managing his estate, his eventual marriage, and his personal issues, until the birth of his first child.

Often called the greatest novel ever written, War and Peace is at once an epic of the Napoleonic Wars, a philosophical study, and a celebration of the Russian spirit. Tolstoy’s genius is seen clearly in the multitude of fully realized and equally memorable characters that populate this massive chronicle. Out of this complex narrative emerges a profound examination of the individual’s place in the historical process, one that makes it clear why Thomas Mann praised Tolstoy for his Homeric powers and placed War and Peace in the same category as the Iliad: “To read him . . . is to find one’s way home . . . to everything within us that is fundamental and sane.”