Анна Каренина
1876
- fiction
- adultery
- married women
- social life and customs
- social conditions
- upper class women
- russian literature
- upper class
- classic literature
- literature
The story
Described by William Faulkner as the best novel ever written and by Fyodor Dostoevsky as “flawless,” Anna Karenina tells of the doomed love affair between the sensuous and rebellious Anna and the dashing officer, Count Vronsky. Tragedy unfolds as Anna rejects her passionless marriage and thereby exposes herself to the hypocrisies of society. Set against a vast and richly textured canvas of nineteenth-century Russia, the novel's seven major characters create a dynamic imbalance, playing out the contrasts of city and country life and all the variations on love and family happiness.
What it’s like
Dense, unhurried prose that moves between drawing rooms with their candlelight and cigarette smoke, muddy country estates, and the cold white of Moscow winters, with long passages of Russian farm work, horse races, and the bustle of railway stations. Tolstoy's narrator watches from close inside characters' heads, so the texture is psychological as much as visual: a sharp eye for gesture, for the awkward pause at dinner, for how a sleeve or a glance can carry a whole marriage. The mood is elegiac and slow-burning, a stately melancholy that warms into quiet joy in the chapters set among fields, haymaking, and simple family routines, then darkens toward a sense of inevitable social pressure. Its rhythm is leisurely, with digressive chapters on farming, politics, and faith that suit unhurried reading. Emotionally it is serious and unsparing without melodrama, and the adultery and its fallout are handled with frank sadness rather than lurid detail; the one violent or disturbing moment is brief and not gratuitous. Best for readers who want a long, absorbing, character-rich novel to live in over several weeks, especially those drawn to domestic realism and moral seriousness.
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