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Anna Karenina
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Anna Karenina (1876) (edit title/settings)

by Leo Tolstoy (Author) (edit contributors)

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Anna Karenina (Russian: Анна Каренина; Russian pronunciation: <ˈanə kɐˈrʲenʲɪnə>) (sometimes Anglicised as Anna Karenin) is a novel by the Russian writer Leo Tolstoy, published in serial installments from 1873 to 1877 in the periodical The Russian Messenger. Tolstoy clashed with its... read more

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Quotes edit see section history

  • Popular Highlights from Kindle Customers
  • ALL happy families resemble one another, each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
    Highlighted by 32 Kindle customers
  • That realization showed him the eternal error men make by imagining that happiness consists in the gratification of their wishes.
    Highlighted by 30 Kindle customers
  • He looked at her as a man might look at a faded flower he had plucked, in which it was difficult for him to trace the beauty that had made him pick and so destroy it.
    Highlighted by 29 Kindle customers
  • All the variety, charm and beauty of life are made up of light and shade.’
    Highlighted by 28 Kindle customers
  • He could find no answer, except life’s usual answer to the most complex and insoluble questions. That answer is: live in the needs of the day, that is, find forgetfulness.
    Highlighted by 24 Kindle customers
  • ‘If goodness has a cause, it is no longer goodness; if it has a consequence — a reward, it is also not goodness. Therefore goodness is beyond the chain of cause and effect.
    Highlighted by 24 Kindle customers
  • ‘By digging into our souls, we often dig up what might better have remained there unnoticed.
    Highlighted by 21 Kindle customers
  • This then is the answer to the question: What is the meaning and purpose of my life? There is a Power enabling me to discern what is good, and I am in touch with that Power; my reason and conscience flow from it, and the purpose of my conscious life is to do its will, i.e. to do good.
    Highlighted by 17 Kindle customers
  • He had heard that women often love plain ordinary men but he did not believe it, because he judged by himself and he could only love beautiful mysterious exceptional women.
    Highlighted by 13 Kindle customers
  • Pretence about anything sometimes deceives the wisest and shrewdest man, but, however cunningly it is hidden, a child of the meanest capacity feels it and is repelled by it.
    Highlighted by 13 Kindle customers
Show all 22 quotes from this book

Setting & Locations edit see section history

1873–1877; the estate of Yasnaya Polyana, near Moscow
  • Russia: Moscow, Petersburg
  • Paris, France
  • Darmstadt: Darmstadt is a small, German-heritage town in Scott Township, Vanderburgh County, Indiana, United States. Settled in 1822.

First Sentence edit see section history

All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

Table of Contents edit see section history

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5
Part 6
Part 7
Part 8

Glossary edit see section history

  • poudre de riz: face powder
  • vinaigre de toilette: cheap vinegar perfume (in this context, he doesn't like the scent she is wearing).Perfume (if it is pleasant smelling) in French is: parfum; what we consider body spray or cheap perfume would be eau de toilette which literally means toilet water
  • Himmlisch ist's, wenn ich bezwungen Meine irdische Begier; Aber doch wenn's nich gelungen Hatt'ich auch recht huebsch Plaisir: It is heavenly when I have masteredMy earthly desires;But when I have not succeededI have also had right good pleasure!
  • Corps of Pages: A military academy in Imperial Russia, which prepared sons of the nobility and of senior officers for military service.
  • Honi soit qui mal y pense: Shamed be he who thinks evil of it
  • belle-soeur: sister in law
  • vous filez le parfait amour.: you are whisked away by the perfect love
  • Tant mieux, mon cher, tant mieux: So much the better, my dear, so much the better
  • paper knife: A paper knife or letter opener is a knife-like object used to open envelopes or to slit uncut pages of books. When a book is printed the pages are laid out on the plate so that after the printed sheet is folded the pages will be in the correct sequence. Books used to not be completely trimmed down after printing, so a paper knife was required to cut through the folds holding the outside of the pages together. This would leave the book with uneven edges on the unbound side of the pages
  • whether this game were worth the candle: not sure whether the returns from an activity or enterprise warrant the time, money or effort required
  • reactionist: extremely conservative
  • farinaceous: starchy
  • There was a king in Thule: Der König in Thule, "The King in Thule", is a poem by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, written in 1774. It was later used by the poet as a brief passage of his masterwork, the tragedy Faust (Part I, lines 2759-82).There was a king in Thule,So faithful to the grave.His love, when she was dying,a goblet of gold him gave.He used to love it deeply,And always drank from it.His eyes they filled with tearsWhenever he emptied it.And when his time to die cameHe counted all his wealth,And everything gave to his heirs,But only kept that cup.He sat at the royal banquet,With all his knights around,In his forefathers' lofty hallThere in his castle by the sea.There stood the old carouser,And drank life's final glow,Then threw the holy goblet farDeep down into the waves.He watched it fall, and drinkingit sank deep into the sea.He closed his eyes forever,And never drank a drop more.
  • Bonne chance: Good luck
  • mon cher: my friend / dear / good fellow
  • Fürst: A German title of nobility, usually translated into English as Prince.The term refers to the head of a principality and is distinguished from the son of a monarch, who is referred to as Prinz. English uses the term Prince for both concepts.
  • sammt Gemahlin und Tochter: together with wife and daughter
  • Fürstin: female form of furst
  • engouements: infatuation / fad / craze
  • sa compagne: his wife / girlfriend / companion
  • Il ne faut jamais rien outrer: One should never overdo
  • Erlaucht, Durchlaucht: My lord, your grace
  • primesautière: impulsive
  • les sept merveilles du monde: the seven wonders of the world
  • Kammerjunker: valet
  • faire la lessive: do the laundry
  • lessive: laundry
  • Tout ça est une blague: It's all a joke
  • Cela n'est pas plus fin que ca: This is not finer than that
  • carte blanche: Full Powers, term in international law referring to the authority of a person to sign a treaty or convention on behalf of a sovereign state
  • fardeau: burden
  • terre-à-terre: earth to earth
  • betrothal ring: engagement ring, less ornate than rings used today
  • tabula rasa: The term in Latin equates to the English "blank slate" (or more accurately, "erased slate") (which refers to writing on a slate sheet in chalk) but comes from the Roman tabula or wax tablet, used for notes, which was blanked by heating the wax and then smoothing it to give a tabula rasa.
  • metayer: One who cultivates land for a share (usually one half) of its yield, receiving stock, tools, and seed from the landlord.
  • Il faut le battre: We must beat/strike
  • le fer: iron
  • le brayer: tar pitch
  • le petrir: knead
  • la constatation d'un fait: a finding of fact
  • la piece de resistance: referring to the best part or feature of a meal, a showpiece, or highlight.
Show all 41 glossary entries

Themes & Symbolism edit see section history

  • Social Change in Nineteenth-Century Russia: Tolstoy sets his tale of adultery and self-discovery against the backdrop of the huge historical changes sweeping through Russia during the late nineteenth century, making the historical aspects of the novel just as important as the personal and psychological aspects. In the Russia ofAnna Karenina, a battle rages between the old patriarchal values sustaining the landowning aristocracy and the new, liberal—often called “libre penseur,” or freethinking, in the novel—values of the Westernizers. The old-timer conservatives believe in traditions like serfdom and authoritarian government, while the Westernizing liberals believe in technology, rationalism, and democracy. We see this clash in Levin’s difficulty with his peasants, who, refusing to accept the Western agricultural innovations he tries to introduce, believe that the old Russian ways of farming are the best. We also see the confusion of these changing times in the question of the zemstvo, or village council, in which Levin tries to participate as a proponent of democracy but which he finally abandons on the grounds that they are useless. The guests at Stiva’s dinner party raise the question of women’s rights—clearly a hot topic of the day, and one that shows the influence of Western social progress on Russia. That Dolly and Anna suffer in their marriages, however, does not bode well for the future of feminism in the world of the novel. Courtship procedures are equally uncertain in the world of Anna Karenina. The Russian tradition of arranged marriages is going out of fashion, but Princess Shcherbatskaya is horrified at the prospect of allowing Kitty to choose her own mate. The narrator goes so far as to say plainly that no one knows how young people are to get married in Russia in the 1870s. Taken together, all this confusion created by fading traditions creates an atmosphere of both instability and new potential, as if humans have to decide again how to live. It is only in such a changing atmosphere that Levin’s philosophical questionings are possible.
  • The Philosophical Value of Farming: Readers of Anna Karenina are sometimes puzzled and frustrated by the extensive sections of the novel devoted to Levin’s agricultural interests. We are treated to long passages describing the process of mowing, we hear much about peasant attitudes toward wooden and iron plows, and we are subjected to Levin’s sociological theorizing about why European agricultural reforms do not work in Russia. Yet this focus on agriculture and farming fulfills an important function in the novel and has a long literary tradition behind it. The idyll, a genre of literature dating from ancient times, portrays farmers and shepherds as more fulfilled and happy than their urban counterparts, showing closeness to the soil as a mark of the good life. Farmers understand growth and potential, and are aware of the delicate balance between personal labor and trust in the forces of nature. In Anna Karenina, Tolstoy updates the idyll by making his spokesman in the novel, Levin, a devoted farmer as well as an impassioned philosopher—and the only character in the novel who achieves a clear vision of faith and happiness.For Levin, farming is a way of moving beyond oneself, pursuing something larger than one’s own private desires—a pursuit that he sees as the cornerstone of all faith and happiness. His days spent mowing the fields bring him into closer contact with the Russian peasants—symbols of the native Russian spirit—than anyone else achieves. Other characters who harp on the virtues of peasants, such as Sergei, rarely interact with them. Levin’s connections with farmers thus show him rooted in his nation and culture more so than Europeanized aristocrats like Anna. He is in closer touch with the truths of existence. It is no accident that Levin finally finds faith by listening to his peasant Fyodor, a farmer. Nor is it accidental that Levin’s statement of the meaning of life in the novel’s last paragraph recalls agriculture. Levin concludes that the value of life is in the goodness he puts into it—just as, we might say, the value of a farm lies in the good seeds and labor that the farmer puts into it. Ultimately, Levin reaches an idea of faith based on growth and cultivation.
  • The Blessings of Family Life: Tolstoy intended Anna Karenina to be a recognizable throwback to the genre of “family novels” popular in Russia several decades earlier, which were out of fashion by the 1870s. The Russian family novel portrayed the benefits and comforts of family togetherness and domestic bliss, often in a very idealized way. In the radically changing social climate of 1860s Russia, many social progressives attacked the institution of the family, calling it a backward and outmoded limitation on individual freedom. They claimed that the family often exploited children as cheap labor. Tolstoy wrote Anna Karenina in part as his personal statement on the family debate. The first sentence of the novel, concerning the happiness and unhappiness of families, underscores the centrality of this idea.Tolstoy takes a pro-family position in the novel, but he is candid about the difficulties of family life. The notion that a family limits the freedom of the individual is evident in Stiva’s dazed realization in the first pages of the novel that he cannot do whatever he pleases. This limitation of freedom is also evident in Levin’s surprise at the fact that he cannot go off to visit his dying brother on a whim but must confer with his wife first and respond to her insistence that she accompany him. Yet despite these restrictions on personal liberty, and despite the quarrels that plague every family represented in Anna Karenina, Tolstoy portrays family life as a source of comfort, happiness, and philosophical transcendence. Anna destroys a family and dies in misery, whereas Levin creates a family and concludes the novel happily. Anna’s life ultimately loses meaning, whereas Levin’s attains it, as the last paragraph of the novel announces. Ultimately, Tolstoy leaves us with the conclusion that faith, happiness, and family life go hand in hand.
  • Adultery: Anna Karenina is best known as a novel about adultery: Anna’s betrayal of her husband is the central event of its main plotline. There was a surge of interest in the topic of adultery in the mid-nineteenth century, as evidenced by works such as Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter (1850) and Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1857). Although the guilty party in these works is always a woman who meets a bad end as a result of her wrongdoing, the nineteenth-century adultery novel is actually less religiously moralizing than we might expect. Anna Karenina is a case in point. Although the novel is loaded with biblical quotations issuing from the mouths of characters and from its own epigraph, its moral atmosphere is not overwhelmingly Christian. Indeed, many of the novel’s devout Christian characters, such as Madame Stahl and Lydia Ivanovna, are repellent and hypocritical. Tolstoy rarely mentions the church in the novel, and even occasionally gently mocks it, as when Levin rolls his eyes at the confession he must undergo to get married. The religious stigma on adultery is certainly present but it is not all that strong.The more important condemnation of adultery in Anna Karenina comes not from the church but from conventional society: adultery is more a social issue in the novel than a moral or religious one. Karenin’s chief objection to Anna’s involvement with Vronsky is not that adultery is a sin, or even that it causes him emotional anguish, but rather that society will react negatively. Karenin thinks of propriety and decency, looking good to the neighbors, over anything else. It is for this reason that he is so willing to overlook Anna’s affair as long as she does not seek a separation or divorce. He does not care so much about the fact that his wife loves another man; he cares only that she continue to appear to be a good wife. This restrictive power of social convention is what Anna comes to loathe and tries to escape—first in Italy, then in seclusion in the countryside. As such, adultery in Anna Karenina 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.
  • Forgiveness: The idea of Christian forgiveness recurs regularly in Anna Karenina and is clearly one of Tolstoy’s main topics of exploration in the novel. If the central action of the plot is a sin, then forgiveness is the potential resolution. And if Anna is a sinner, then our attitude toward her and toward the novel depends on whether and how much we can forgive her. Tolstoy establishes forgiveness as a noble ideal when Dolly exclaims to Anna, who is helping the Oblonskys through their marital difficulties, “If you forgive, it’s completely, completely.” This ideal form of pardon amounts to a total erasure of the sin “as if it hadn’t happened,” as Anna puts it. Yet Tolstoy does not mindlessly accept forgiveness as a noble Christian virtue, but instead forces us to consider whether forgiveness is possible and effective. The very epigraph to the novel—“Vengeance is mine; I will repay”—values vengeance, the opposite of forgiveness. This opening thought haunts the entire novel, suggesting that perhaps forgiveness is not the ultimate virtue after all.Moreover, the characters’ attitudes toward forgiveness are sometimes compromised. Dolly ends up forgiving Stiva, but we wonder whether her pardon amounts to her simply shutting her eyes to reality, as we know that Stiva continues his womanizing with unabated enthusiasm afterward. In Dolly’s case, forgiveness looks like gullibility or resignation. Forgiveness is even more dubious in other instances. When the seemingly dying Anna begs Karenin’s forgiveness and he grants it, both are sincere. But the forgiveness has little effect: Anna continues to love Vronsky and loathe Karenin as much as ever, and though Karenin is more amenable to the idea of divorce, his treatment of Anna does not change much. In another novel we might expect the Karenins or Oblonskys to renew their marital vows and live happily ever after, but for Tolstoy forgiveness does not have this fairy-tale effect. Karenin forgives Anna, but afterward their emotions remain the same as before. At the end of the novel, Anna begs forgiveness of God just before killing herself. Indirectly, she also begs it of us readers, for it is up to us to determine whether our emotional attraction to Anna outweighs our moral judgment of her life. Ultimately, for readers, forgiving her may be less important than identifying with her.
  • The Interior Monologue: Though Tolstoy has a reputation for being a simple and straightforward writer, he was in fact a great stylistic innovator. He pioneered the use of a device that is now commonplace in novels but was radically new in the nineteenth century—the interior monologue. The interior monologue is the author’s portrayal of a character’s thoughts and feelings directly, not merely in paraphrase or summary but as if directly issuing from the character’s mind. Earlier writers such as Shakespeare had used the monologue in drama, writing scenes in which characters speak to the audience directly in asides or soliloquies. In narrative fiction, however, writers had rarely exploited the interior monologue for extended passages the way Tolstoy does in Anna Karenina. The interior monologue gives the reader great empathy with the character. When we accompany someone’s thoughts, perceptions, and emotions step by step through an experience, we inevitably come to understand his or her motivations more intimately.In Anna Karenina, Tolstoy gives us access to Levin’s interior monologue at certain key moments in his life: his experience of the bliss of love when Kitty accepts him as husband, his physical ecstasy at mowing with the peasants, and his fear when Kitty is suffering in childbirth. But Tolstoy uses the device of interior monologue far more extensively and movingly in his portrayal of Anna’s last moments, on her ride to the station where she dies at the end of Part Seven. Without access to her thoughts, we would have a much flimsier understanding of what drives Anna to suicide. Without it, her death would be just another casualty on the long list of women in Russian literature who kill themselves over love. Reading Anna’s monologue, however, we see the liveliness and even humor that make her such a vivid individual in the novel, as when she interrupts her gloomy meditations to comment on the ridiculous name of the hairstylist Twitkin. We also see the extent to which Anna has become a burden to herself—she dreams of getting rid of Vronsky “and of myself.” The interior monologue shows us her suicide not as a glamorous cliché but as a simple and heartbreaking attempt to rid herself of the very self she once attempted to liberate.

Series & Lists edit see section history

This is book 54 of 70 in Oprah's Book Club. (authoritative list)

Preceded by The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, and followed by The Good Earth.

This is book 48 of 96 in Newsweek's Top 100 Books: The Meta-List. (authoritative list)

Preceded by Paradise Lost, and followed by Hamlet.

This book is in Time Magazine's 10 Greatest Books of All Time. (authoritative list)
This is book 54 of 196 in BBC 'Big Read' Top 200 Novels, 2003. (authoritative list)

Preceded by The Stand, and followed by A Suitable Boy.

This is book 37 of 113 in Book Smart Reading List. (community list)

Preceded by Vanity Fair, and followed by Kristin Lavransdatter.

This is book 31 of 95 in Telegraph Top 100 Books, 2008. (authoritative list)

Preceded by The Wind in the Willows, and followed by David Copperfield.

This is book 13 of 91 in The Novel 100: A Ranking of the Greatest Novels of All Time, 2004. (authoritative list)

Preceded by Bleak House, and followed by Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

This is book 103 of 195 in Shelfari Most Popular (June 2010). (authoritative list)

Preceded by The Godfather, and followed by The God of Small Things.

This is book 840 of 1272 in 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die. (authoritative list)

Preceded by The Return of the Native , and followed by L'Assommoir.

This book is in Big Fat Books. (community list)
This book is in 100 Fantabulous Book Challenge. (community list)
This is book 110 of 195 in Shelfari Most Popular (June 2011). (authoritative list)

Preceded by The Old Man and the Sea, and followed by Blink.

This book is in Penguin's Top 100 Classics. (authoritative list)
This is book 112 of 194 in Shelfari Most Popular (December 2010). (authoritative list)

Preceded by A Time to Kill, and followed by Where the Wild Things Are.

This book is in Guardian 1000 Novels Everyone Must Read. (authoritative list)
This book is in Hopeless Romantic. (community list)
This is book 107 of 195 in Shelfari Most Popular (December 2011). (authoritative list)

Preceded by Interview with the Vampire, and followed by Frankenstein.

This book is in More Book Lust. (authoritative list)
This book is in Store russiske fortellere. (community list)

Authors & Contributors edit see section history

  1. Leo Tolstoy (Author)

Other Contributors:

  1. Aylmer Maude (Author)
  2. Alfred Molina (Reader)
  3. Louise Maude (Translator)

First Edition edit see section history

Original Language: Russian
Publisher: The Russian Messenger
Country: Russia
Publication Date: 1876
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 864

Awards edit see section history

Classification edit see section history

  • Library of Congress: PG3366 .A6
  • Dewey: 891.733

Notes for Parents edit see section history

Reading Level: Young Adults

Excellent example of Russian epic literature.

Links to Supplemental Material edit see section history

Movie Connections edit see section history

  • Anna Karenina (1914 film): a Russian adaptation directed by Vladimir Gardin.
  • Anna Karenina (1915 film), (IMDb): an American version starring Danish actress Betty Nansen.
  • Love (1927 film) (IMDb): an American version, starring Greta Garbo and directed by Edmund Goulding. This version featured significant changes from the novel and had two different endings, with a happy one for American audiences.
  • Anna Karenina (1935 film) (IMDb): the most famous and critically acclaimed version, starring Greta Garbo and Fredric March and directed by Clarence Brown.
  • Anna Karenina (1948 film) (IMDb): starring Vivien Leigh, Ralph Richardson and directed by Julien Duvivier.
  • Anna Karenina (1953 film): a Russian version directed by Tatyana Lukashevich.
  • Anna Karenina (1967 film) (IMDb): a Russian version directed by Alexander Zarkhi.
  • Anna Karenina (1974 film): a Russian version directed by Margarita Pilikhina.
  • Anna Karenina (1985 film) (IMDb): a TV Movie starring Jacqueline Bisset and Christopher Reeve, directed by Simon Langton.
  • Anna Karenina (1997 film) (IMDb): the first US version to be filmed on location in Russia, directed by Bernard Rose and starring Sophie Marceau and Sean Bean
  • Anna Karenina (2005 film): a Russian mini-series by Sergei Solovyov.
  • Anna Karenina (2012 film) (IMDb): an upcoming English version by Joe Wright and starring Keira Knightley.
Show all 12 movie connections

More Books Like This edit see section history

   
  • Madame Bovary
  • Shadows on the Grass
  • Far from the Madding Crowd
  • Stories of Anton Chekov
  • Resurrection
  • The Idiot
  • Six Records of a Floating Life
  • Blood and Guts in High School
  • A Passage to India
  • The Torrents of Spring
  • War and Peace
  • Effi Briest
  • Jane Eyre

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