Brooklyn author studies Tolstoy’s literary life, complex heroine in ‘Creating Anna Karenina’
Bob Blaisdell, professor of English at Kingsborough Community College, celebrated publication of his new book, “Creating Anna Karenina: Tolstoy and the Birth of Literature’s Most Enigmatic Heroine,” on a Zoom publication party, November 15.
Author of many Dover books and critic for the San Francisco Chronicle and The Christian Science Monitor, Blaisdell learned Russian in order to research Tolstoy’s life while he wrote the novel. Through the author’s personal notes, he explores the classic, comparing Tolstoy and his family to his characters. With examples hitherto unavailable, he creates a fully dimensional verbal picture of the author and his thoughts as excerpted from his diary, his wife’s papers and observations from contemporary critics.
In Blaisdell’s recreation of the author as a three-dimensional person, the reader can understand Tolstoy’s mindset and his approach to developing the dynamic Anna through many phases. Blaisdell reveals Tolstoy’s method of creativity, allowing the heroine to grow from a simple character to a complex individual. Through Blaisdell’s analysis, she is endowed with a life that draws the reader into the glamorous world of czarist Russia.
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View MoreNew York City’s most populous borough, Brooklyn, is home to nearly 2.6 million residents. If Brooklyn were an independent city it would be the fourth largest city in the United States. While Brooklyn has become the epitome of ‘cool and hip’ in recent years, for those that were born here, raised families here and improved communities over the years, Brooklyn has never been ‘uncool’.