Novel: Anna Karenina

Overview
Leo Tolstoy’s 1877 novel follows the intersecting lives of aristocratic and provincial Russians to probe love, marriage, faith, and the social codes of a changing society. It contrasts a destructive urban liaison with a grounded rural marriage, using parallel plots to examine the costs of passion and the search for meaning.

Setting and Premise
Set in late 19th-century Moscow, St. Petersburg, and the countryside, the story opens with domestic turmoil: Stiva Oblonsky’s infidelity nearly ruins his marriage to Dolly. Anna Karenina, Stiva’s sister and the wife of government official Alexei Karenin, arrives to mediate. At a train station and later at a ball, Anna meets Count Alexei Vronsky, a brilliant cavalry officer whose flirtation with Kitty Shcherbatsky has led Kitty to reject a sincere proposal from landowner Konstantin Levin. Anna and Vronsky’s mutual attraction initiates the novel’s central crisis, even as Levin retreats to his estate to grapple with work, class relations, and his longing for family life.

Anna and Vronsky
Anna’s affair with Vronsky soon becomes notorious. Her husband, formal and emotionally restrained, vacillates between preserving public decorum and seeking a divorce. Anna, torn between maternal love for her son and the intoxicating freedom offered by Vronsky, defies convention and leaves her husband. The lovers tour abroad and then settle in St. Petersburg, but respectability eludes them. Vronsky’s stalled career, the couple’s social ostracism, and Anna’s exclusion from her son deepen her insecurity.

Tolstoy charts Anna’s psychological spiral with forensic detail. She experiences jealousy, dependency, and growing resentment as she senses Vronsky’s life remaining open in ways hers does not. Attempts at reconciliation and legal resolution fail; religious and social pressures entangle Karenin, who briefly forgives Anna in the wake of a dangerous childbirth but ultimately maintains control of her access to her son. The famous horse race, where Vronsky’s mistake kills his mare, mirrors the reckless momentum of their passion. In the end, Anna’s mounting despair, intensified by laudanum use and fear of abandonment, culminates in her suicide beneath a train, a stark emblem of modern forces and inexorable fate.

Levin and Kitty
Running alongside is Levin’s steadier, quieter story. Humiliated by Kitty’s early rejection, he immerses himself in agrarian reform, attempting to reconcile noble privilege with peasant realities. He and Kitty later reconcile and marry, their union tested by illness, domestic strain, and childbirth. Levin’s intellectual restlessness, debates with his brother and urbane acquaintances, doubts about faith and the possibility of goodness, leads to a crisis of meaning. A humble insight prompted by a peasant’s wisdom helps him see moral life not as a philosophical proof but as a practice rooted in love, work, and acceptance.

Themes and Motifs
Tolstoy juxtaposes social hypocrisy with private conscience, exposing gendered double standards that punish Anna while excusing men like Stiva. The novel contrasts city glitter with rural labor, showing the costs of superficial society and the solace of honest work. Trains, salons, and officialdom symbolize modernity’s impersonal pressures; harvests, skating, and domestic scenes embody cycles of continuity. Love appears in diverse forms, adulterous passion, conjugal devotion, familial care, each with its promises and perils.

Ending and Significance
Anna’s death leaves Vronsky shattered and seeking escape in war, while Karenin retreats into rigid virtue. Levin, holding his newborn son, finds a fragile but sustaining faith that life’s meaning lies in living rightly toward others. The novel’s twin arcs create a moral spectrum rather than a verdict: one life consumed by desire and judged by society, the other tempered through responsibility and inward clarity. Its psychological depth, social sweep, and moral inquiry make it a cornerstone of realist fiction and a lasting study of how love and conscience contend with the world.