"All happy families resemble one another, but each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way," goes the famous first sentence of Tolstoy's second major novel, Anna Karenina. Also written in what Tolstoy called the "realist" mode, it is not epic like War and Peace, but it involves a grand passion that portrays one of the only truly tragic heroines in modern literature, and what feels like a prophetic understanding of what the Romantic heart would reap in the modern world. The novel also does what only novels seem to be able to do; it weaves equal threads of the tragic and comic genres in one overriding narrative.
We will discuss George Gibian's translation: Book I, Part I, Chapter I--Book I, Part II, Chapter XXVI in the first class.
Four Tuesdays, 6:30-8:30 pm: Sept. 11 & 25, Oct. 2 & 9
Tuition: Members $90, Nonmembers $105, Member Teachers $30
Text: Norton's Critical Edition, ISBN: 0-393-96642-9
Text available online at amazon.com or barnesandnoble.com
or in stores at the Barnes and Noble at Lincoln Park (7700 W. Northwest Hwy).