Anna Karenina
A woman whose vitality the social world cannot house once she leaves her role.
Realism & Victorian · Novel · 1878
Anna Karenina
Leo Tolstoy
Anna’s affair with Vronsky is set beside Levin’s search for a livable faith in work and marriage. Two plots argue about what a life is for.
Realist novel
Characters
Konstantin Levin
Landowner whose spiritual restlessness is the novel’s other center.
Alexei Karenin
A statesman of surfaces, crushed and rigid by turns.
Themes
Adultery and society
Passion is judged by a world that is not innocent.
The meaning of work
Levin’s fields answer Anna’s drawing rooms.
Motifs
Modern speed that begins and ends Anna’s fate.
Happy and unhappy households as the book’s opening law.