Widely considered a pinnacle in realist fiction, Tolstoy considered Anna Karenina his first real novel and Dostoevsky declared it to be '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 is currently enjoying enormous popularity, as demonstrated by a recent poll of 125 contemporary authors by J. Peder Zane, published in 2007 ...