Anna Karenina
(Leo Tolstoy)

Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina is more than the story of the title character, Anna Karenina, although her story is a very strong component of the plot. The novel chronicles the lives of a group of Russian aristocrats and while the focus is on them, their interaction with the servants and peasants in their employ reveals the lives of the lower classes as well.

Anna Karenina is a resident of Petersburg (more commonly known as St. Petersburg) and the wife of a senior government official, Alexei Karenin, who is twenty years her senior. She is an attractive vibrant woman, devoted to her husband and small son. This all changes when she meets the handsome and dashing Count Vronsky – she falls completely in love with him, and he with her. Both are willing to give up their position and status in society to be together. In time they live as a couple, but Anna never does obtain a divorce from Karenin. Towards the end of the novel, Anna commits suicide in a train station and it is fitting that she had first met Vronsky in a train station. She has an emotional breakdown and is convinced that the Count no longer loves her. Anna can be seen as a victim of a society that restricts women to being wives and mothers with little expression for passion, expression, or intellect. Anna breaks loose from the restrictions and ultimately pays the price – she cannot expect to gain happiness after so blatantly breaking the rules. She pays the price with emotional fragmentation and then her death.

Although Anna and Vronsky are central characters in the novel, they do not dominate the narrative. The author also touches on the lives of other aristocrats – including the Prince and Princess Shtcherbatsky, who are aristocrats of a long established order. They are good people who see the world from their narrow point of view. The Shtcherbatskys have three daughters, and two in particular, Dolly and Kitty, are important characters in the novel. Dolly is married to a self-indulgent and charming prince (Stepan Oblonsky) who while good-natured and extroverted, cannot see why he should live a life of restraint – be it with women, food, drink, or money. The plot begins with his infidelity and gradually exposes his weaknesses to the point where his brother-in-law, Konstantin, must take over the running of his affairs.

Konstantin Levin, a landowner who runs his estate, is another main character in the novel and represents the ideal of the thoughtful, introverted, conscientious man. He is also highly emotional and throughout the book he wrestles with his conscience on many issues – from love to the land to the peasants to politics. The reader experiences Levin’s religious beliefs change from agnostic to a believer in God as a life force (although he is not completely converted to organized religion).

Anna Karenina is a novel with many layers – including personal relationships, societal structure, political influences, and family matters. Tolstoy brilliantly narrates a story that presents the characters as believable human beings caught up in expectations and events that swirl around them.