Approaches to Teaching Tolstoy's Anna Karenina

Liza Knapp, associate professor of Slavic languages at the University of Minnesota, is the editor of Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Ilych: A Critical Companion (Northwestern UP, 1999) and the author of Leo Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Ilich: An Interpretation (Macmillan, 1993). He has published widely in Tolstoy studies, most recently On the Style of a Story for the People (1998) and Brother or Other: Tolstoy's Equivocal Surrender to the Concept of Brotherhood (1996). Amy Mandelker is associate professor of compartive literature at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. Her articles of Tolstoy, Russian and European literatures, and literary theory have appeared in PMLA, Comparative Literature, Novel, Tolstoy Studies Journal, and Slavic and East European Journal. She is the author of Framing Anna Karenina: Tolstoy, the Woman Question, and the Victorian Novel (Ohio State UP, 1993), coeditor (with Elizabeth Powers) of Pilgrim Souls: An Anthology of Spiritual Autobiographies (Simon, 1999), and editor of Bakhtin in Contexts: Across the Disciplines (Northwestern UP, 1996).

The essays reflect an awareness of the latest research on the novel, and the range of topics and list of contributors are impressive. Those less familiar with Russian literature or with Tolstoy will find something new on virtually every page, but even Russian specialists will find inspiration from many of the essays. --Barry Scherr, Dartmouth College