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 th