Five-minute digest

Anna Karenina

Leo Tolstoy

Summary

Anna Karenina is Leo Tolstoy's second great novel, serialized in The Russian Messenger from 1875 to 1877 and published as a book in 1878. It sets two stories side by side. In one, Anna Arkadyevna Karenina, the wife of a senior government official in St. Petersburg, falls in love with Count Alexei Vronsky, a wealthy cavalry officer. In the other, Konstantin Levin, a landowner who lives on his estate, courts Kitty Shcherbatskaya, marries her and searches for the meaning of his life. The novel opens in Moscow, where Anna has come to reconcile her brother Stepan Oblonsky with his wife Dolly after his affair with a governess. At the railway station she meets Vronsky, whom Kitty, Dolly's younger sister, hopes to marry. Kitty refuses Levin's proposal for Vronsky's sake, but Vronsky follows Anna back to St. Petersburg. Their affair becomes known to society and to Anna's husband, Alexei Karenin, a correct and self-controlled man who first insists on appearances. Anna nearly dies giving birth to Vronsky's daughter; Karenin, moved, forgives her, and Vronsky attempts suicide. Anna then leaves her husband and her son Seryozha to travel abroad with Vronsky, but Karenin refuses a divorce, and on her return to Russia she finds herself shut out of the society that once admired her. Isolated on Vronsky's estate and in Moscow, jealous and dependent on morphine to sleep, she becomes convinced that his love is fading. In the seventh part she throws herself under a train. Levin's story runs alongside. After Kitty recovers from her disappointment, the two marry, and Levin struggles with farm management, the peasants, his brother Nikolai's death and the birth of his son. Troubled by the thought of death and unable to believe, he finds in the last part a kind of faith through a peasant's remark that one should live for God and the soul. The book's epigraph, 'Vengeance is mine; I will repay', has been read in many ways. Tolstoy wrote the novel in the years before the spiritual crisis he described in A Confession, and its contrast between the Anna and Levin plots reflects his concern with marriage, family and the search for meaning. Dostoevsky and Nabokov were among its admirers, and it is widely regarded as one of the greatest novels ever written. Constance Garnett's translation of 1901 introduced it to many English readers.

Top Lessons

Two stories in counterpoint
Tolstoy alternates Anna's story with Levin's. Readers can compare how each character seeks happiness and what each finds.
Related across the library
- The Death of Ivan Ilyich, Ch. 8
  Opium and morphine for pain and sleeplessness; the doctor's routine visit; the family goes to the theatre.
- War and Peace, Full Text
  IX CHAPTER X CHAPTER XI CHAPTER XII BOOK ONE CHAPTER I Well Prince so Genoa and Lucca are now just family estates of the Buonapartes But I warn you if you don t tell me that this means war if you still try to defend the infamies and horrors perpetrated by that Antichrist I really believe he is Antichrist I will have nothing more to do with you and you are no longer my friend no longer my faithful slave as you call yourself But how do you do I see I have frightened you sit down and tell me all the news It was in...
- Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking, Full Text
  temperaments Undignified as such a treatment may seem to some of my colleagues I shall have to take account of this clash and explain a good many of the divergencies of philosophers by it Of whatever temperament a professional philosopher is he tries when philosophizing to sink the fact of his temperament Temperament is no conventionally recognized reason so he urges impersonal reasons only for his conclusions Yet his temperament really gives him a stronger bias than any of his more strictly objective premises I...
- The Death of Ivan Ilyich, Full Text
  others who were seldom known to perform a kind or generous action but the most barbarous and tyrannical of all were those former serfs who arose from the dirt and became princes It was this latter class who made life literally a burden to those who were unfortunate enough to come under their rule Many of them had arisen from the ranks of the peasantry to become superintendents of noblemen s estates The peasants were obliged to work for their master a certain number of days each week There was plenty of land and...
- Uncle Tom's Cabin, Lesson: Forgiveness to the end
  Forgiveness to the end. Tom forgives Legree and the drivers Sambo and Quimbo even as they beat him, and his patience leads the two men to repentance. Stowe presents his death as a martyrdom modeled on Christ's.
Society and judgment
Anna is excluded from society while men who behave similarly are not. The novel shows the double standard without simply excusing or condemning its characters.
Related across the library
- Effi Briest, Lesson: Codes outlive their meaning
  Codes outlive their meaning. Innstetten admits he feels no hatred and that the affair is long over, yet he fights the duel because society demands it. Fontane shows how conventions can compel cruelty even in those who doubt them.
- BUtterfield 8, Lesson: Fiction drawn from headlines
  Fiction drawn from headlines. O'Hara took a tabloid case and imagined the social world around it. The novel raises questions about how fiction uses real tragedies.
- The Sound and the Fury, Medical lens
  The novel is a literary portrait, not a case history, and Faulkner gives Benjy no diagnosis; retrospective labels for him are readings only. What the text does show in detail is how a family and town in the 1900s–1920s treated a disabled son: renaming, confinement to the yard, the threat of the state asylum at Jackson, and surgical castration after an encounter at the gate is taken as an assault. Quentin's section traces the planning of a suicide with obsessive attention to time and to his father's despairing ph...
- Silas Marner, Lesson: Trusting in the dark
  Trusting in the dark. Dolly Winthrop cannot explain why Silas was falsely condemned, but she teaches him to do the right thing as far as he knows and to trust. Her simple faith helps him live with a wrong that is never set right in this life.
- Passing, Lesson: Identity is performed and policed
  Identity is performed and policed. Passing shows race as a social category enforced by gaze, law and family secrets rather than a fixed biological fact. Clare's passing and Irene's occasional passing both expose how arbitrary and dangerous the colour line is.
The search for meaning
Levin's doubts about death and faith end in a simple insight rather than an argument. Students can consider how meaning is found in ordinary work and family life.
Related across the library
- The Life of John Sterling, Lesson: Correcting a friend's likeness
  Correcting a friend's likeness. Carlyle wrote because he believed Hare's memoir, kind as it was, showed a pale figure in a torn surplice instead of the man he knew. The book therefore raises the question of what a biographer owes the dead: accuracy, proportion, and the courage to disagree with another friend in print. Carlyle's answer is that the whole life must outweigh any single phase, which is why he stresses that the curacy lasted only eight months.
- The Last Battle, Chapter 14: Night Falls on Narnia
  Tirian and the children watch the death of the Narnian world and grieve for it before Peter shuts the door.
- Jude the Obscure, Part Sixth, Ch. X–XI
  Jude's final illness after the rainy journey to Marygreen, Vilbert's return at his bedside, and his death alone during the college festivities.
- Measure for Measure, Lesson: Facing death: the friar's counsel and Claudio's terror
  Facing death: the friar's counsel and Claudio's terror. Act 3, Scene 1 sets two speeches side by side. The disguised Duke argues, in a mood close to Seneca and to the medieval contempt of the world, that life is worth so little a wise man will not grieve to lose it. Claudio accepts this, until Isabella's news gives him a chance to live, and then pours out a vision of death as cold obstruction, fiery floods and thick-ribbed ice. Neither speech names Christ or resurrection, though both are spoken in a play about g...
- The Beast in the Jungle, Lesson: What May Bartram chooses
  What May Bartram chooses. May sees the truth long before Marcher and decides not to say it outright. Her silence can be read as patience, as respect for his freedom, as self-protection, or as a failure of her own. The story never enters her mind, so readers must infer her motives from what she says and does, especially in the April scene when she rises and waits.

Verified Quotes

“Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”

— Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, Part One, Chapter 1, trans. Constance Garnett (1901).Quote card

Addington v. Texas, Full Text
Vernon The trial on these issues extended over six days The State offered evidence that appellant suffered from serious delusions that he often had threatened to injure both of his parents and others that he had been involved in several assaultive episodes while hospitalized and that he had caused substantial property damage both at his own apartment and at his parents' home From these undisputed facts two psychiatrists who qualified as experts expressed opinions that appellant suffered from psychotic schizophre...
Hard Times, Full Text
In this life we want nothing but Facts sir nothing but Facts The speaker and the schoolmaster and the third grown person present all backed a little and swept with their eyes the inclined plane of little vessels then and there arranged in order ready to have imperial gallons of facts poured into them until they were full to the brim CHAPTER II MURDERING THE INNOCENTS THOMAS GRADGRIND sir A man of realities A man of facts and calculations A man who proceeds upon the principle that two and two are four and nothing...
The Major Symptoms of Hysteria, Lecture IV: Double Personalities
a relaxation and declares she is much better than before the fit Another characteristic phenomenon is that she attaches no importance to what has happened she is not in the least ashamed of her cries her indecent attitudes the disorder of her acts She seems to have forgotten everything and in truth remembers only the facts previous to the fit all that has occurred after Convulsive Attacks the sensations of choking and the ascent of the ball no longer exists for her This oblivion is very important no doubt it is...
Coriolanus, Lesson: The fable of the belly and the body politic
The fable of the belly and the body politic. Menenius answers a hunger riot with an old political allegory, also found in Livy and Plutarch: the body's members rebel against the belly, which replies that it sends nourishment to all. The fable is clever and partly true, but it is told to men who are actually starving, and the First Citizen interrupts it with a list of the body's more active parts. The scene teaches students to admire an argument's form while asking whom it serves and whether it answers the compla...
Effi Briest, Chapter I
without condemnation tears or pointing a moral They made Fontane famous Frau Jenny Treibel an exquisitely humorous picture of the Berlin bourgeoisie and Effi Briest the most profound miracle of Fontane's youthful art added considerably to the fame of the gray-haired modern while The Poggenpuhls and Stechlin won him further laurels at a time when most writers would long ago have been resting on those they had already achieved If a line were drawn to represent graphically his productivity from his sixtieth year on...

“but my life now, my whole life apart from anything that can happen to me, every minute of it is no more meaningless, as it was before, but it has the positive meaning of goodness, which I have the power to put into it.”

— Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, Part Eight, Chapter 19, trans. Constance Garnett (1901).Quote card

Journey to the Center of the Earth, Chapter XXI, Compassion Fuses the Professor's Heart
And raising his flask he emptied it every drop between my lips. Dying of thirst in the tunnel, Axel receives the last water his uncle had secretly saved.
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Part IV
Alone, alone, all, all alone, His desolation after the crew have died.
Sermons and Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, Xv. Meditation
and their critical days and they are judged and denominated according to the times when they befall us What poor elements are our happinesses made of if time time which we can scarce consider to be any thing be an essential part of our happiness All things are done in some place but if we consider place to be no more but the next hollow superficies of the air alas how thin and fluid a thing is air and how thin a film is a superficies and a superficies of air All things are done in time too but if we consider tim...
The Varieties of Religious Experience, In Filial Gratitude And Love
from the account of Sir William Hamilton s class room therein contained Hamilton s own lectures were the first philosophic writings I ever forced myself to study and after that I was immersed in Dugald Stewart and Thomas Brown Such juvenile emotions of reverence never get outgrown and I confess that to find my humble self promoted from my native wilderness to be actually for the time an official here and transmuted into a colleague of these illustrious names carries with it a sense of dreamland quite as much as...
The Complete Poems, Song of Myself, §51
Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes The speaker accepts contradiction as part of the capacious self imagined by the poem.

Medical Lens

The novel depicts Anna's puerperal fever after childbirth, her growing dependence on morphine to sleep, and her suicide; Levin's brother Nikolai dies of consumption, a deathbed scene that contrasts the doctors' helplessness with Kitty's nursing.

Childbirth Maternal Addiction Suicide Tuberculosis Consumption Death Dying

Part Four
Anna's dangerous illness after the birth of her daughter, during which she asks Karenin's forgiveness.
Part Five
Nikolai Levin's death from consumption in a provincial hotel, nursed by Kitty.
Part Seven
Anna's morphine use and the despairing state of mind that precedes her death at the railway station.

Anna Karenina

Summary

Top Lessons

Two stories in counterpoint

Society and judgment

The search for meaning

Verified Quotes

Medical Lens