The story
Anna Karenina was serialized in The Russian Messenger from 1875 to 1877 and published as a book in 1878. It opens with the famous line that all happy families are alike, while each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. Anna, a married society woman in St. Petersburg, falls in love with the officer Count Vronsky and leaves her cold husband Karenin, only to be shunned by society and torn by jealousy and her separation from her son. A parallel plot follows Konstantin Levin, a thoughtful country landowner, and his courtship and marriage with Kitty.
Leo Tolstoy (1828 to 1910) wrote it after War and Peace, in a Russia changed by the emancipation of the serfs of 1861 and by the arrival of railways, which appear at key moments and in Anna's death. Tolstoy had started with a plan to write a moral tale of an unfaithful wife, but the book grew into a broad picture of Russian society and into a study of marriage, faith and the meaning of life. Levin's search for meaning mirrors Tolstoy's own spiritual crisis, which followed soon after and led him to his later radical Christian writing.
Dostoevsky praised it as a work of perfection, and the book has been repeatedly named among the greatest novels ever written. It has been filmed many times, with Greta Garbo and Vivien Leigh among those who played Anna.
Why it mattered
- The novel is held up as a model of psychological realism, showing characters through minute detail of thought and action.
- It turned the question of women's place in marriage and society into major literature, long before modern debates.
- Levin's search gave expression to the spiritual crisis that led Tolstoy to his later influence on Gandhi and others.
Sources
- Anna Karenina Britannica
- 3 plots of Russian literature borrowed from real life Russia Beyond (GW2RU)
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