Anna karenina how many books

Unable to bear being an outcast, as well as her growing perception that the Count has ceased to love her, Anna, in a feverish state, throws herself under the wheels of an oncoming train--an event mirrored in the early pages of the book. Set against this drama, Anna Karenina is also the story of Constantine Levin, a gentleman farmer of sorts, whose search for happiness and meaning in life culminates, not with his long-desired marriage to Kitty Shcherbatskaya the event he hoped would secure his happiness , but with the simple advice of a peasant about "living rightly, in God's way.

Anna Karenina is a morality play that deals with the damaging effects of morality on Anna and Vronsky. It is also a novel about the meaning of life and the place happiness does or does not play in it, and a meditation on death and the lessons it teaches. In many ways, Anna Karenina is Tolstoy's most personal work in that many of its scenes mirror Tolstoy's relationship with his wife, Sonya; in particular, Levin's courtship of Kitty expressing his love for her by writing with chalk on a table, as well as the wrenching scene where he gives her his diaries to read.

The writing of the final scenes of the novel, specifically Levin's fevered search for an answer to his questions about the meaning of existence, reflect Tolstoy's own process of religious conversion, enacted dramatically in his memoir, A Confession , which was written on the heels of Anna Karenina and is considered by many to be one of the most soul-searching statements of spirituality.

The publication of Tolstoy's novel Anna Karenina , which his contemporary, Dostoyevsky, considered to be "a perfect work of art," was an end to the life he had known, one of material and emotional luxury, and would signal the beginning of a deeper quest for the meaning of existence.

Furthermore, this break with the past would manifest itself in Tolstoy's moral and religious writings and his rapid movement toward social reform. Although he would go on to publish other novels, such as Resurrection , and numerous stories like his masterpiece , The Death of Ivan Ilyich , Tolstoy's career as a novelist in many ways reached its pinnacle--its perfect balance of drama, morality, and philosophical inquiry--with the character of Anna Karenina and her seemingly irrational embrace of death.

Equally compelling is the character of Anna's husband, Karenina, as portrayed by Tolstoy with all his complexity and emotional denial over the loss of Anna and his subsequent brief embrace of Christian forgiveness.

Finally, there is Vronsky's startling realization when Tolstoy writes: "It showed him [Vronsky] the eternal error men make in imagining that happiness consists in the realization of their desires. As well, there is the question to what extent we are happiest perhaps a suspect word here living the "examined life" as opposed to the "unexamined life. How do Levin and Anna's husband Karenina manifest different and similar attitudes with respect to religion? When Karenina forgives Anna following her near-death experience, do you think he is sincere?

When she doubts his love in the latter part of the book, do you think she is right to do so? Is it in her imagination or is he culpable? After her suicide and his breakdown, is Vronsky's love for her deeper, truer? How does Karenina's hatred of Anna and their son affect him? Compare and contrast Anna and Levin's search for meaning: Levin's that ends in a kind of spiritual grace and Anna's that culminates in death.

But when you see the truth, what are you to do? Do you view this book as pessimistic overall? Does Levin's enlightenment at the end balance out Anna's tragedy?

Only that had been sorrow, and this was joy. But that sorrow and this joy were equally beyond the usual plane of existence: they were like openings through which something sublime became something visible. Yes, Tolstoy is the undisputed king of creating page-long sentences which I love, by the way - love that is owed in full to my literature-teacher mother admiring them and making me punctuate these never-ending sentences correctly for grammar exercises.

But he is also a master of restating the obvious, repeating the same thought over and over and over again in the same sentence, in the same paragraph, until the reader is ready to cry for some respite. This, as well as Levin's at times obnoxious preachiness and the author's frequently very patriarchial views, was what made this book substantially less enjoyable than it could have been.

I highly recommend this film. View all comments. In the beginning, reading Anna Karenin can feel a little like visiting Paris for the first time. Much of what you see from the bus you recognize from pictures and movies and books.

You expect to like it. You want to like it. But after a few days, you settle in, and you fee In the beginning, reading Anna Karenin can feel a little like visiting Paris for the first time. But after a few days, you settle in, and you feel the immensity of the place opening up all around you.

You start to trust the abundance of the place, and your anxieties that someone else will have eaten everything up before your arrival relax. This book is not afraid to take up any part of human life because it believes that human beings are infinitely interesting and infinitely worthy of compassion.

Tolstoy takes his characters seriously enough to acknowledge that they have spiritual lives that are as nuanced and mysterious as their intellectual lives and their romantic lives.

I knew to expect this dimension of the book, but I could not have known how encouraging it would be to dwell in it for so long. In the end, this is a book about life, written by a man who is profoundly in love with life. Reading it makes me want to live. View all 94 comments. This is a book that I was actually dreading reading for quite some time. It was on a list of books that I'd been working my way through and, after seeing the size of it and the fact that 'War And Peace' was voted 1 book to avoid reading, I was reluctant to ever get started.

But am I glad that I did. This is a surprisingly fast-moving, interesting and easy to read novel. The last of which I'd of never believed could be true before reading it, but you find yourself instantly engrossed in this kind This is a book that I was actually dreading reading for quite some time.

The last of which I'd of never believed could be true before reading it, but you find yourself instantly engrossed in this kind of Russian soap opera, filled with weird and intriguing characters. The most notable theme is the way society overlooked mens' affairs but frowned on womens', this immediately created a bond between myself and Anna, who is an extremely likeable character.

I thought it had an amazing balance of important meaning and light-heartedness. Let's just say, it's given me some courage to maybe one day try out the dreaded 'War And Peace'. View all 42 comments. If you have read this book, please proceed. If you are never going to read this novel be honest with yourself , then please proceed. If you may read this novel, but it may be decades in the future, then please proceed. Trust me, you are not going to remember, no matter how compelling a review I have written.

If you need Tolstoy talking points for your next cocktail party or soiree with those literary, black wearing, pseudo intellectual friends of yours, then this review will come in handy. If they pin you to the board like a bug over some major plot twist, that will be because I have not shared any of those.

If this happens, do not despair; refer them to my review. Exchange them for other more enlightened intellectual friends. This fulfillment showed him the eternal error men make in imagining that their happiness depends on the realization of their desires. She dutifully produced a son for him and settled into a life of social events and extravagant clothes and enjoyed a freedom from financial worries. Maybe this life would have continued for her if she had never met Count Alexei Kirillovich Vronsky, but more than likely, her midlife crisis, her awareness of the passage of time, would have compelled her to seek something more.

And what now? If he killed me, if he killed him, I could bear it all, I could forgive it all, but no, he…. Maybe he was too contented with their life together and, therefore, took their relationship for granted. She wanted passion from him even if it was to murder her lover and herself.

Even if it was something tragic, she wanted something to happen, something that would make her feel The same face was always going to greet her in the mirror. The same thoughts were always going to swim their way back to the surface. We can not mask the problems within ourselves by changing lovers. The mask will eventually slip, and all will be revealed.

Ugly can be very pretty. Is there such a thing as being too beautiful? Can being so beautiful make someone cold, disdainful, and unable to really feel empathy or even connected to those around them? Her type of beauty is a shield that insulates her even as her insecurities swing the sword that stabs the hearts of those who despise her and those who love her.

He was a well meaning, wealthy landowner who, unusually for the times, went out and worked the land himself. He got his hands dirty enough that one could actually call him a farmer. He was led to believe by his friends and even the Shcherbatsky family that their youngest daughter, Kitty, would be an affable match for him.

Stiva was recently caught and forgiven for having a dalliance with a household staff, but no sooner was he out of that boiling water of that affair before he was having liaisons with a ballerina. This did lead me to believe that life would never be satisfying for either Stiva or his sister Anna because there was always going to be pretty butterflies to chase as the attractiveness of the one they had began to fade. That was like catching a molotok hammer right between the eyes as a serp sickle swept Kostya off his feet.

It was almost enough for me start chain smoking Turkish cigarettes or biting my nails down to the quick while I waited for the outcome. Tolstoy was brilliant at rounding out characters so our preconceived notions or the projections of ourselves that we place upon them are forced to be modified as we discover more about them.

Levin had his own problems. He had been reading the great philosophers, looking for answers. He found more questions than answers in religion. He abandoned every lifeboat he climbed into and swam for the next one. And I cannot know that, therefore I cannot live. It is irrefutable. Well, there is a lot of eternal lying down going on, but no duplicity. None of us are going to escape the reaper. No one is ascending on a cloud or going to the crossroads to make a deal with the Devil.

So the question that Levin ended up asking himself, the Biggest question even beyond, why am I here? Without immortality, everything we attempt to do can seem futile. Some would make the case that we live on in our kids and grandkids. I say bugger to that.

I want more time! Well, there are ways to be immortal, and one of them is to write a masterpiece like Anna Karenina that will live forever. By the end, I am ready to throttle Anna until her pretty eyes bug out of her head and her cheeks turn a vibrant pink, but at the same time, she seemed to be suffering from a host of mental disorders.

She was so cut off from everyone and so disdainful of everyone. I had to believe her loathing of people was a projection of how she felt about herself. She needed to find some satisfaction in the ordinary and quit believing that a change in geography or in lovers was ever going to fix what was wrong with herself.

She had such a destructive personality. One man tried to kill himself from her actions and another contemplated the act. Her feelings of being stifled were perfectly natural. We all feel that way at points in our lives. We feel trapped by the circumstances of our life. She sacrificed everything to chase a dream.

The dream ate her. This book is a masterpiece, not just a Russian masterpiece but a true gift to the world of literature. This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here. Please avoid reading this if you're looking for an in depth analysis of Anna Karenina. I should also mention that there is a big spoiler in here, in case you've remained untouched by cultural osmosis, but you should read my review anyway to save yourself the trouble.

I grew up believing, like most of us, that burning books was something Nazis did though, of course, burning Dis WARNING: This is not a strict book review, but rather a meta-review of what reading this book led to in my life.

I grew up believing, like most of us, that burning books was something Nazis did though, of course, burning Disco records at Shea stadium was perfectly fine. I believed that burning books was only a couple of steps down from burning people in ovens, or that it was, at least, a step towards holocaust. If I heard the words "burning books" or "book burning," I saw Gestapo, SS and SA marching around a mountainous bonfire of books in a menacingly lit square.

It's a scary image: an image of censorship, of fear mongering, of mind control -- an image of evil. So I never imagined that I would become a book burner. That all changed the day Anna Karenina, that insufferable, whiny, pathetic, pain in the ass, finally jumped off the platform and killed herself. I'd read Count of Monte Cristo one summer when I was working day camps, Les Miserable one summer when I was working at a residential camp, and Shogun in one of my final summers of zero responsibility.

A summer shifting back and forth between Marc Antony in Julius Caesar and Pinch, Antonio and the Nun which I played with great gusto, impersonating Terry Jones in drag in Comedy of Errors , or sitting at a pub in the mountains while I waited for the matinee to give way to the evening show, seemed an ideal time to blaze through a big meaty classic.

I chose the latter and was very quickly sorry I did. I have never met such an unlikable bunch of bunsholes in my life m'kay I admit it I am applying Mr. Mackey's lesson. You should see how much money I've put in the vulgarity jar this past week. I loathed them all and couldn't give a damn about their problems. By the end of the first part I was longing for Anna to kill herself I'd known the ending since I was a kid, and if you didn't and I spoiled it for you, sorry.

But how could you not know before now? I wanted horrible things to happen to everyone. I wanted Vronsky to die when his horse breaks its back. I wanted everyone else to die of consumption like Nikolai. And then I started thinking of how much fun it would be to rewrite this book with a mad Stalin cleansing the whole bunch of them and sending them to a Gulag in fact, this book is the ultimate excuse for the October Revolution though I am not comparing Stalinism to Bolshevism.

If I'd lived as a serf amongst this pack of idiots I'd have supported the Bolshies without a second thought. It was a compulsion I had never been able to break, and I had the time for it that summer. I told myself many things to get through it all: "I am missing the point," "Something's missing in translation," "I'm in the wrong head space," "I shouldn't have read it while I was living and breathing Shakespeare," "It will get better. Not for me. I hated every m'kaying page.

Then near the end of the summer, while I was sitting in the tent a couple of hours from the matinee I remember it was Comedy of Errors because I was there early to set up the puppet theatre , I finally had the momentary joy of Anna's suicide. She was gone. And I was almost free. But then I wasn't free because I still had the final part of the novel to read, and I needed to get ready for the show, then after the show I was heading out to claim a campsite for an overnight before coming back for an evening show of Caesar.

I was worried I wouldn't have time to finish that day, but I read pages whenever I found a free moment and it was looking good.

Come twilight, I was through with the shows and back at camp with Erika and my little cousin Shaina. The fire was innocently crackling, Erika was making hot dogs with Shaina, so I retreated to the tent and pushed through the rest of the book. When it was over, I emerged full of anger and bile and tossed the book onto the picnic table with disgust. I sat in front of the fire, eating my hot dogs and drinking beer, and that's when the fire stopped being innocent. I knew I needed to burn this book.

I couldn't do it at first. I had to talk myself into it, and I don't think I could have done it at all if Erika hadn't supported the decision. She'd lived through all of my complaining, though, and knew how much I hated the book and I am pretty sure she hated listening to my complaints almost as much.

So I looked at the book and the fire. I ate marshmallows and spewed my disdain. I sang Beatles songs, then went back to my rage, and finally I just stood up and said "M'kay it! The fire around the book blazed high for a good ten minutes, the first minute of which was colored by the inks of the cover, then it tumbled off its prop log and into the heart of the coals, disappearing forever.

I cheered and danced and exorcised that book from my system. I felt better. I was cleansed of my communion with those whiny Russians. And I vowed in that moment to never again allow myself to get locked into a book I couldn't stand; it's still hard, but I have put a few aside.

Since the burning of Anna Karenina there have been a few books that have followed it into the flames. Some because I loved them and wanted to give them an appropriate pyre, some because I loathed them and wanted to condemn them to the fire. I don't see Nazis marching around the flames anymore either. I see a clear mountain night, I taste bad wine and hot dogs, I hear wind forty feet up in the tops of the trees, I smell the chemical pong of toxic ink, and I feel the relief of never having to see Anna Karenina on my bookshelf again.

I feel much better now. In lieu of a proper review of my favorite book, and in addition to the remark that it would be more aptly named Konstantin Levin , I present to you the characters of Anna Karenina in a series of portraits painted by dead white men. View all 59 comments. People are going to have to remember that this is the part of the review that is entirely of my own opinion and what I thought of the book, because what follows isn't entirely positive, but I hope it doesn't throw you off the book entirely and you still give it a chance.

They owe me hardcore now. As does Mr. This book was an extremely long read, not because of it's size and length ne People are going to have to remember that this is the part of the review that is entirely of my own opinion and what I thought of the book, because what follows isn't entirely positive, but I hope it doesn't throw you off the book entirely and you still give it a chance.

This book was an extremely long read, not because of it's size and length necessarily, but because of it's content. More often than not I found myself suddenly third a way down the page after my mind wandered off to other thoughts but I kept on reading You know, totally zoning out but continuing to read? The subject I passed over though was so thoroughly boring that I didn't bother going back to re-read it Leo Tolstoy really enjoys tangents.

Constantly drifting away from the point of the book to go off on three page rants on farming methods, political policies and elections, or philosophical discussion on God. Even the dialogue drifted off in that sort of manner. Tolstoy constantly made detail of trifling matters, while important subjects that added to what little plot line this story had were just passed over. Here is a small passage that is a wonderful example of what constantly takes place throughout the book: "Kostia, look out!

There's a bee! Won't he sting? Give us your theory," demanded Katavasof, evidently provoking Levin to a discussion. Just a small example of how Tolstoy focuses much more on philosophical thought, and thought in general, more than any sort of action that will progress the story further.

That's part of the reason the story took so long to get through. The editing and translation of the version I got also wasn't very good. Kit reckons that that's part of the reason I didn't enjoy it as much, and I am apt to agree with her. If you do decide to read this book, your better choice is to go with the Oprah's Book Club edition of Anna Karenina.

The characters weren't too great either and I felt only slightly sympathetic for them at certain moments. The women most often were whiny and weak while the men seemed cruel and judgemental more often than not. Even Anna, who was supposedly strong-willed and intelligent would go off on these irrational rants. The women were constantly jealous and the men were always suspicious. There's not much else to say that I haven't already said. There were only certain spots in the book which I enjoyed in the littlest, and even then I can't remember them.

But remember this is just one girl's opinion, if it sounded like a book you might enjoy I highly advise going out to read it. Just try and get the Oprah edition. View all 88 comments. A complex novel in eight parts, with more than a dozen major characters, it is spread over more than pages depending on the translation and publisher , typically contained in two volumes.

It deals with themes of betrayal, faith, family, marriage, Imperial Russian society, desire, and rural vs. The plot centers on an extramarital affair between Anna and dashing cavalry officer Count Alexei Kirillovich Vronsky that scandalizes the social circles of Saint Petersburg and forces the young lovers to flee to Italy in a search for happiness.

After they return to Russia, their lives further unravel. View all 9 comments. View all 10 comments. What is the most important thing about Anna Karenina?

Is it the first line, "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way"? This sounds so true but it isn't really. Is it that Anna experiences much more intolerance for her unfaithfulness and leaving her husband than does her brother who screws around like a dog?

Is it Konstantin Levin's attempts to marry into the aristocracy and his problem with religion? Or is the entire story just Tolstoy's way of seducing the r What is the most important thing about Anna Karenina? Or is the entire story just Tolstoy's way of seducing the reader into reading the political nub of the story, the feudalism that was at the heart of all politics, morality and social position. I enjoyed the book when I read it, but I have to say I skimmed over a lot of the politics and did wonder which in Tolstoy's heart is the story he wanted to tell, love stories or political ones?

How I came to read Anna Karenina, appendicitis and an air hostess ending with a rotten tomato. I had a test on it in two days and hadn't even opened it so I said I had stomach ache and went to the school sick room. This was a tall, narrow room with a tiny window about 8' up and painted with shades of olive green and aubergine eggplant.

If you weren't sick going in.. In the early hours of the morning, I really had stomach ache. I had an emergency appendectomy in a nursing home with an operating theatre. I was very sick indeed and in bed for weeks. Had I brought it on myself? Never mind. Next day three things happened, one bad and one good and one fantastic. My period came on for the first time. I was a Woman! I told my mother and my grandmother leaned over from the visitor chair and slapped my face very hard, "That's to take the shock of the blood away.

Then the good. My mother said I had been waiting for this day and she really let loose at my grandmother.

They had a very fierce row. It was wonderful. My mother didn't love me and she never ever defended me or involved herself with me in any way. Memories of being slapped herself I suppose. My mother was very pretty and was the first of her family to be married.

On her wedding day, her mother slapped her face as she put the veil on her. She mellowed. Everyone else in the nursing home was old except for an air hostess of She didn't have a private room and didn't like being with the old people so would wander into mine to sit and read and eat all my chocolates, of which I had endless boxes. Gaskell and Zola. So for nearly three weeks my days were filled with reading, talking about books with my new friend and eating chocolates all day long.

I was actually thrown out of the nursing home. The food there was terrible. One lunchtime there was something forgettable and salad. The tomato was perfect-looking but mushy, almost liquid so I threw it out of the window and it landed on one of the nuns who was beside herself with anger. I didn't care, my friend had left a few days before, left her books for me too in exchange for some fancy ribbon-bowed boxes of chocolates.

We wrote for a bit, were penpals, but eventually that died. The age gap and where we were in our lives was too far apart.

But I will always remember her and the fabulous books she introduced me too. Thank you Helen. It was like all the best books are, total immersion in another world populated by real people whose lives outside of those described you could easily imagine, not just "well-drawn characters". Austen, Bronte, Mrs. Gaskell and Zola were just as good, all of them worlds I lived in when I read their books.

View all 34 comments. Sep 17, Kevin Ansbro rated it it was amazing Shelves: classic-literature , favourites , human-emotions , morality , gentle-humour , literature-for-grown-ups , social-awkwardness. You see, I was force-fed Tolstoy at college his writing, not his flesh, silly! Mine wasn't a college for cannibals! So, how amazed was I that Anna K has "Leo Tolstoy would meet hatred expressed in violence by love expressed in self-suffering. He is slyly hilarious. How did I not know this?

Please note that I haven't read this novel in Russian Cyrillic. I acknowledge that my perception owes a great deal to the amazing interpretive work of the translators, but let's imagine that we in the West have enjoyed his work as the great man intended. The title is something of a misnomer and doesn't do justice to an endearing love story that also captures the disparity between city and country life in 19th-century Russia.

For a start, Anna K isn't the star of the show. That billing falls to our anti-hero, Konstantin Dmitrich Levin, a socially awkward, highly-intelligent loner who considers himself to be an ugly fellow with no redeemable qualities. Despite being weighed down by all this existential angst, he worships Kitty Shcherbatskaya, an attractive young princess whom he believes to be out of his league.

Kitty is described as being "as easy to find in a crowd as a rose among nettles. Levin's love rival, raffishly handsome Count Vronsky, couldn't be more dissimilar. He is socially adept and careful not to offend, whereas Levin could probably start an argument with a goldfish. What a fabulous read this is. Tolstoy's levity and perspicacity shines from every page and the badinage between the main characters is exquisitely observed.

He does though have an idiosyncratic way of writing: adjectives are thickly laid on with a trowel and he loves to use repetition to emphasise a point. Anna herself is fascinating, and to affirm just how fascinating she is, Tolstoy employs the word fascinating seven times in one paragraph! I've even started doing it myself!

How fascinating! When not beating you about the head with repetition, the Russian master can do majestic descriptive imagery as good as anyone. One simple scene, where Kitty collapses into a low chair, her ball gown rising about her like a cloud, was just perfectly captured. This is a wonderful story of fated love and aristocratic hypocrisy. Tolstoy uses Levin as his political mouthpiece to rail against the ills of late 19th-century Russia, and the author's philosophy of non-violent pacifism also had a direct influence on none other than Mahatma Gandi.

Anna Karenina is often cited as 'one of the best books ever written'. So who am I to disagree? Tolstoy draws a portrait of three marriages or relationships that could not be more different.

Anna Karenina is rightly called a masterpiece. Moreover Tolstoy does not spare on social socialism and describes the beginnings of communism, deals with such existential themes as birth and death and the meaning of life. He also seems like a close observer of human passions, feelings and emotions. All in all I was touched by his b Tolstoy draws a portrait of three marriages or relationships that could not be more different.

All in all I was touched by his book because it was one of the most impressive books I have ever read. View all 27 comments. Not since I read The Brothers Karamazov have I felt as directly involved in characters' worlds and minds. I was hooked on Anna Karenina from the opening section when I realized that Tolstoy was brilliantly portraying characters' thoughts and motivations in all of their contradictory, complex truth.

However, Tolstoy's skill is not just in characterization--though he is the master of that art. His prose invokes such passion. There were parts of the book that took my breath because I re Not since I read The Brothers Karamazov have I felt as directly involved in characters' worlds and minds.

There were parts of the book that took my breath because I realized that what I was reading was pure feeling: when we realize that Anna is no longer pushing Vronsky away, when Levin proposes to Kitty, and later when Levin thinks about death. The book effectively threw a shroud over me and sucked me in--I almost missed my train stop a couple of times.

That being said, there were some parts that were difficult to get through. I felt myself slowing down in Part VI. I was back in through the remainder of the book once I hit Part VII, but I understand how the deep dive into politics and farming can be off-putting. Still, in those chapters Tolstoy's characters are interacting, and it's incredible to see them speak and respond to one another.

It's not only worth the trouble, but deep down, it's no trouble at all. It's to be savored, and sometimes we must be forced to slow down and think about the characters' daily life as they navigate around in their relationships.

A word about this translation. When I was in college I attempted to read the Constance Garnett translation. I didn't stop because it was awful I think finals came up, then the holidays, then more classes, etc. However, I never really felt like the words were as powerful as they should have been.

Years later, the only image that stuck in my mind was of Levin meeting Kitty at the ice skating rink. I just never really entered the world of Anna Karenina , perhaps my fault more than anything. However, the diction and sentence construction in Pevear and Volokhonsky's translation is poetic and justifies the title "masterpiece. Each word has its place. Understandably, many are unwilling to give themselves to this book.

Many expect it to do all of the work. But it's an even better read because if the reader works, the experience of reading this book is incredible. View all 17 comments. Anna Karenina has a life as the noble society expects from her. She is married to a wealthy and influencal state official and gave birth to a male heritage, but struggles with her social role until she encounters the officer Count Vronskij. Their subsequent affair becomes public, causing her and her lover to be banished from society and family alike, loosing her son and driving her into despair.

Contrasting with this is the story of Levin, a wealthy landowner, striving to find contentment and a meaning to his life by purposely turning his back on the aristocracy and finding his peace in religion and rural living. Just as the stories are parallel, the endings are as well, from horrible tragedy and death to a fulfilled life. Tolstoy uses his characters to paint a realistic picture of tensions between rural and aristocratic life, societal pressure, family values, bureaucracy, politics, religion, moral believes and legal inequality in the Russian aristocratic dynasty.

Anna Anna is the beautiful, intelligent, elegant and educated wife of the cold and passionless government official Alexei Karenin. She is capable to play the role of the cultivated, beautiful, society wife and hostess with grace. She is very nearly the ideal aristocratic Russian wife of the s Keira Knightly as Anna Karenina Anna lives life on her own terms.

She has an affair with count Vronsky, the man she truly loves, that becomes public. Though disgraced, she dares to face St. Petersburg high society and refuses the exile, to which she has been condemned.

Anna is a martyr to the Russian patriarchal system and its double standard for male and female adultery. Her brother Stiva constantly cheats on his wife without moral struggle, or social consequences.

For Anna love is stronger than duty. She rejects Alexeis request to stay with him to maintain outward appearances of an intact marriage and family. Her exile from civilized society is a symbolic rejection of all the social conventions we normally accept dutifully contrasting with with the ideal of living for God and goodness. Her adultery is a side effect of the stifling forces of society, making the novel a work of social criticism as much as a story of marital betrayal.

Levin Kitty and Levin Levin acts as the novel's co-protagonist, as central to the story as Anna herself. He has many similarities with Tolstoy, including his first name , and many of the details of his love for of Kitty—including the missing shirt at the wedding.

He is neither a freethinking rebel, nor a bookish intellectual, or a bureaucrat. Thereby Levin represents Russias issue with western influenze: he distrusts liberals who wish to westernize Russia and rejects their analytical and abstract approach, but on the other hand recognizes the value of western technology and agricultural science.

He follows his own vision of things, rather than adopting any group views. Levin finding freedom in his farm work Despite a loner, Levin is not self-centered or views himself as exceptional or superior. His most important experiences; his happiness of being in love and his fear for his wife in childbirth, are not rare or aristocratic but shared by millions.

He is characterized as an ordinary Russian man, despite his noble origin. When Levin mows for an entire day alongside his peasants, he sincerely enjoys the labor and experiences it as psychologically rewarding and his final discovery of faith is equally ordinary.

Levin embodies the simple virtues of life and humanity. Social Change in 19th Russia Tolstoy sets his tale of adultery and self-discovery against the backdrop of the major historical changes in Russia during the late 19th. The Russian tradition of arranged marriages was going out of fashion, but still fathers were horrified of letting their daughters choose whom to marry for themselves. The narrator goes so far as to say plainly that no one knows how young people are to get married in Russia in the s.

Her affair is not a sudden impulse or an act of self destruction but she truly loves someone else and the laws and social structures prevent her from being with him. Kitty turns down her true love Levin, because her father wants her to marry someone else.

But at her debut the match making backfires, leaving her socially humiliated. In the novel there are no turning points, only points, and characters travelling through them. For a spacious novel so concerned with families there's a mysterious absence at the heart of Anna Karenina.

The heroine has no childhood. She comes equipped with a son, a dull older husband, a brother, friends, a place in high society, but no past, no younger self. There is no description of how she came to be married. Her parents are, presumably, dead, and are never mentioned. She is fully formed, ready to fall in love with the dashing Vronsky. It's not just Anna. Most of the other principal characters have no forebears on the scene. Levin was, like Tolstoy, orphaned at an early age. Vronsky's mother is occasionally present but when we first encounter him Tolstoy quickly tells us: "Vronsky never knew family life.

Although children as characters are present only in the background with one brief exception , the book is preoccupied with the parent-child relationship: with having or not having children, with choosing between paternal-maternal and romantic-sexual love, or working out what to tell children when they ask what life is for. And the novel is about children in a deeper way, one that speaks to the stretched-out generations of the rich world now, where people in their 20s, 30s and 40s expect to have parents who are still alive and constantly reassure each other that they are young — that they are, in effect, still children.

Anna, Vronsky and Levin are in their early 30s, young in today's terms, but Tolstoy doesn't provide them with an earlier generation to backstop them, or to be remembered. They are obliged to stand independently as grown men and women.

This means following an existing set of social rules, like Vronsky "One must pay one's gambling debts, but need not pay one's tailor; one must not tell a man a lie, but one may lie to a woman" , or breaking rules, as Anna does, or inventing their own set of rules, as Levin tries to do.

They can have children — they should, in Tolstoy's view, have children — but they cannot be children. However, among the principal characters, there is an intriguing exception: Stiva Oblonsky. It's the Oblonskys, not the Karenins, who are referred to in the novel's famous first line: "All happy families are alike, each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

Like the other main characters in the book, like Tolstoy himself, the Oblonskys are aristocrats, with the trappings of the upper class — rank, servants, a town house and a place in the country. But they're in debt, and the country house is falling to pieces. Where Dolly, a kind, pious, modest, anxious figure, the mother of five living and two dead children, belongs very much to the old Russia, Stiva Oblonsky, her husband, is recognisable as the caricature of a modern man.

Stiva is an old Russian short form of the name Stepan, but I can't help thinking of him as a tanned guy called Steve in a pink open-necked shirt. Beloved by everyone for his charm, his healthy glow and his radiant smile, he's generous, gregarious, greedy, hedonistic, trivial, shallow, fond of gadgets and sex with non-threatening women, infantalised by fashion and marketing.

He serves six different kinds of flavoured vodka at his parties. He reads a liberal paper not because he's a liberal but because it suits his lifestyle. He uses his connections to get a cushy, well-paid government job and is selling off his wife's properties cheaply, yet still struggles to afford the life he thinks he deserves. The clashes between the moralistic Levin and his friend Oblonsky, sometimes affectionate, sometimes angry, and Levin's linkage of modernity to Oblonsky's attitudes — that social mores are to be worked around and subordinated to pleasure, that families are base camps for off-base nooky — undermine one possible reading of Anna Karenina , in which Anna is a martyr in the struggle for the modern sexual freedoms that we take for granted, taken down by the hypocritical conservative elite to which she, her lover and her husband belong.

That elite does exert a growing influence as the book unfolds, and it is true that the moralistic side of the establishment prevents Karenin showing Anna mercy. A case could be made that the unhappy family of the opening is the Russian aristocracy in the s, trying to hold the line against excessive change after the grant of freedom to millions of human beings it had owned as slaves, the peasant serfs, in The principal characters in Anna Karenina are literally part of one big formerly slave-owning family.