Anna Karenina

About this book

Anna Karenina is Leo Tolstoy’s second great novel, serialized between 1875 and 1877 and published in book form in 1878. It has two main plots that run side by side and barely touch. One follows Anna, a married woman in St. Petersburg society, into an affair with a cavalry officer, Count Vronsky. The other follows Konstantin Levin, a landowner, through his courtship, marriage, farm management and search for something to believe in.

The novel is regularly named by writers as the finest ever written, and the basis for that claim is usually its realism: the sense that nothing is being arranged for effect, that the characters’ choices follow from who they are, and that the author sees all of them clearly. Tolstoy called it his first true novel, distinguishing it from War and Peace.

The story

The book opens in the Moscow house of Anna’s brother, Stiva Oblonsky, whose wife Dolly has discovered his affair with the governess. Anna comes from St. Petersburg to reconcile them. At the Moscow railway station she meets Vronsky, who has been casually courting Dolly’s younger sister Kitty, and the attraction is immediate. Kitty, in the same weeks, refuses a proposal from Levin, who has come to Moscow for the purpose and goes back to his estate humiliated.

Anna returns to her husband, Karenin, a senior government official twenty years her elder, and to her small son. Vronsky follows her. What develops between them, and how Petersburg society, her husband and her own conscience respond, is the Anna plot. The Levin plot moves at a different pace, through the farming year, a brother’s illness, a second attempt at Kitty and the ordinary difficulties of a marriage that is not a scandal.

Themes and historical context

Tolstoy began the book after reading a fragment by Pushkin and after a neighbor’s mistress threw herself under a train, an event he had gone to see the aftermath of. The 1870s in Russia were a time of debate about the reforms of the previous decade, the condition of the peasants, the role of the gentry and the appeal of Western ideas. Levin’s arguments with his brother and his neighbors are those debates in miniature, and his struggle to work alongside his peasants reflects Tolstoy’s own experiments on his estate.

The book’s handling of adultery is what made it controversial and what keeps it read. Tolstoy neither excuses Anna nor condemns her from outside. The novel shows exactly how the social rules work, how they fall harder on a woman than on a man, and how a person can see all of that and still be unable to act differently. The epigraph, “Vengeance is mine; I will repay,” has been argued about since publication.

Levin’s story ends with a crisis of faith that follows closely what Tolstoy was going through as he finished the book. Within a few years he had renounced his earlier fiction and turned to religious writing, and Anna Karenina is in that sense the last novel of his first life.

Who should read it

This is a long book, around eight hundred pages in most editions, but the chapters are short and the two plots keep each other moving. The Garnett translation reads smoothly. Readers who come for Anna sometimes resent the Levin chapters, and some who come for Levin find Anna’s story painful; that division is part of the experience. Some background on Russian names helps. Expect a few slow stretches around the provincial elections and the farming, and expect the final part to be hard to read quickly.

Edition notes

The Gutenberg text is the translation by Constance Garnett (1861-1946), first published in 1901, which introduced the novel to much of the English-speaking world and remained the standard version for decades. The transcription was prepared by David Brannan, Andrew Sly and David Widger.