"Vladimir Nabokov called it ""one of the greatest love stories in world literature."" The passionate and unhappily married Anna's affair with Count Vronsky and its tragic consequences have moved readers for generations. Legend has it that Tolstoy began writing a cautionary tale about adultery and ended up falling in love with his magnificent heroine, it is rare to find a reader of the book who doesn't experience the same kind of emotional upheaval. Anna Karenina is filled with major and minor characters who exist in their own right and fully embody their mid-nineteenth-century Russian milieu, but it still belongs entirely to the woman whose name it bears, whose portrait is one of the truest ever made by a writer."