Widely regarded as a pinnacle in realist fiction, Tolstoy considered Anna Karenina his first true novel, when he came to consider War and Peace to be more than a 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 the novel as, ’the best ever written.’ The novel continues to enjoy popularity, as demonstrated by a recent poll of 125 contemporary authors by J. Peder Zane, published in 2007 in ‘The Top Ten’ in Time, which declared that Anna Karenina is the ‘greatest novel ever written.’