"My God, he hates her!" Keira Knightley observes of Tolstoy's attitude toward Anna Karenina.

Rereading the book in preparation for playing Anna on screen in Joe Wright's new film, Knightley was struck by the sheer animosity that the Russian author had for the heroine of his novel.

Wright has taken a stylised approach to his material, setting the majority of the film in a theatre on the grounds that the Russian aristocrats "were living their lives as if they were on a stage". He has talked about the film as portraying love in all its manifestations. Knightley excels as the beautiful socialite whose destructive love affair with Count Vronsky leads eventually to her ruin and suicide. When we first see her, she is self-assured and seemingly worldly-wise. She advises her sister-in-law Dolly (Kelly Macdonald) to stay loyal to her husband Oblonsky in spite of his philandering ways and gives Dolly's younger sister advice about how to behave at the ball. Then Vronsky begins his aggressive courtship. Knightley expertly depicts the transformation in Anna's character: how she at first flirts with the cavalry officer and is flattered by his attention but then how she soon becomes utterly in thrall to him. She humiliates her earnest husband Karenin (Jude Law) and is turn spurned by him.

Sales of Anna Karenina have shot up in recent years after Oprah Winfrey chose the book as Oprah's Book Club summer selection in 2004 and published articles on its feminist subtext on her website. Oprah called it "one of the greatest love stories of our time" but Keira Knightley remains intensely suspicious of the novelist's attitude toward her heroine.

Tolstoy certainly doesn't give Anna an easy time of it. The book was partly inspired by a real-life incident in which a spurned woman had thrown herself underneath a train. Tolstoy had seen her mangled corpse.niketn shoes wholesale, cheap tn shoes ,hublotreplica are full of unique and elegance. "Standing in a corner of the shed, he had observed every detail of the woman's body lying on the table, bloody and mutilated, with its skull crushed,Rubiks tagheuerreplica See if you can solve this famous puzzle in this great implementation.Official web site of the luxury French nikeshoes and bag designer." Henri Troyat writes in his biography of Tolstoy. "How shameless, he thought, and yet how chaste. A dreadful lesson was brought home to him by that white, naked flesh, those dead breasts, those inert thighs that had felt and given pleasure. He tried to imagine the existence of this poor woman who had given all for love, only to meet with such a trite, ugly death."

Despite her chequered origins, actresses clamour to play Anna Karenina. Over the last century, there have been a dozen or more film adaptations of the book. Actresses from Greta Garbo and Vivien Leigh to Sophie Marceau as well as Knightley have appeared as the adulterous heroine on film.offers replicashoes and Loafers for Men, There have been TV versions too with Helen McCrory, Nicola Pagett and Claire Bloom all taking on the role.