Anna Karenina

First published in book form in 1878, Anna Karenina is one of the great novels of nineteenth-century Russian literature, a searching portrait of a society caught between inherited convention and the desire for a more authentic life. At its centre is Anna, a woman of intelligence and sensibility whose passionate affair with the dashing Count Vronsky brings her into conflict with the rigid moral codes of aristocratic society. Alongside her story unfolds that of Konstantin Levin, a landowner wrestling with questions of faith, labour, marriage and the meaning of existence. Through these intertwined lives, Tolstoy moves between glittering drawing rooms, provincial estates and the intimate dramas of family life, revealing the tensions beneath the polished surface of imperial Russia.

Both an intimate tragedy and an expansive social panorama, Anna Karenina explores adultery, motherhood, jealousy, spiritual doubt and the uneasy relationship between individual freedom and social expectation. Tolstoy's extraordinary psychological insight allows no character to remain simply a villain or a hero; each is rendered with a humanity that resists easy judgement. The novel's formal richness, moral complexity and finely observed domestic detail helped establish it as a landmark of realist fiction, while its questions about love, happiness and the good life remain strikingly immediate. Among Tolstoy's most celebrated works, it stands as a profound study of the ways private desires collide with the worlds we inherit.

From the book

“All the variety, all the charm, all the beauty of life is made up of light and shadow.”

— Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

On Anna Karenina

“The greatest of all novelists.”

— Virginia Woolf, on Leo Tolstoy