Anna KareninaLeo Tolstoy
About Anna Karenina
Tolstoy published in book form in 1878 after serial installments from 1875 to 1877. The novel runs in eight parts and opens with the sentence that frames its inquiry: all happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. The epigraph, from Romans, is "Vengeance is mine; I will repay."
Two plots move side by side. Anna, wife of the official Karenin, falls into a passion for the officer Vronsky. Society closes around them. She loses her place, her son, and finally her hold on life, and dies under a train. Beside her story runs that of Konstantin Levin, a landowner who fails in his first proposal to Kitty, works his estate, marries her at last, and struggles toward a faith he can live by. City and country, adultery and marriage, death and birth are set in continuous comparison.
Tolstoy judges without sermons. He shows the pressure of social opinion, the honesty and cruelty of desire, and the daily labor that either steadies a life or fails to. The book is the Syntopicon's great modern novel of family, love, and happiness: what holds a household together, and what happens when passion claims an authority higher than duty or law.