Lovely young wife has illicit affair with dashing young count. Leaves ageing husband for lover. Husband won't grant divorce. High society shuns wife. After a bit of high drama, she throws herself under a rushing train. Sounds familiar?

Right. Now imagine the same story with cell phones and cocaine, sushi bars and convertibles - these are the attributes of the new comic book version of Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, which will surely have the bearded author turning in his grave.

Tolstoy's best-known heroine is depicted as the bored wife of an oligarch with a cocaine habit and a fetish for stuffed animals in this unorthodox rendition of one of the world's great novels.

The comic book, published by the World of New Russians with captions in both English and Russian, is 10 times shorter than Tolstoy's 900-page novel. But its creators say the only changes they made to those bits of the original text that they included was trimming the quotes.

"We had some fun and made a little mischief, but we preserved 98 per cent of Tolstoy's text," says Katya Metelitsa, who wrote the book's "script".

"The plot fits nicely for a comic book; the idea has been in the air for some time." She admits she admires Tolstoy's heroine but can't forgive him for the way he coldly killed her.

"Tolstoy is a great master, but I don't regard him with the customary awe and deference," she admits.

Formerly a journalist for Radio Liberty and Kommersant's popular Stolitsa magazine, Metelitsa authored and masterminded the Novy Russky Bukvar, or New Russian ABCs, published in 1998.

Metelitsa says that, although her Anna Karenina was not designed to refer readers to the original, it somehow worked out that way.

"Many people have read Anna Karenina, but few of them remember what's in it. And many, after seeing the comic book, would say: `I need to reread it'."

What they won't find in the original is Karenina informing Vronsky that she's pregnant by sending a message to his pager, or chatting on her mobile phone and driving around in a new Volkswagen Beetle. To bring the novel even more up to date, outings to the theatre are replaced by Hollywood blockbusters starring the likes of Bruce Willis.

The Karenina comic book is the first case of such liberties being taken with the classics. But pared-down versions of Tolstoy's other epic, the four-volume saga War and Peace, have been published.

"War and Peace Lite", which went on sale in Moscow less than a year ago, was about half as long as the original, with almost no philosophical digressions or French text and a happy ending for Prince Andrei Bolkonsky and Petya Rostov. But that version of the novel was just Tolstoy's original draft, which he rejected.

Metelitsa says she considers comic books a type of art - "not literature, but still an art". Anna Karenina in comic form is a first. But Metelitsa plans to set a trend: her next comic book will be a cyber-punk version of Alexander Pushkin's The Queen of Spades, set for publication in the summer.