Anna Karenina
Tolstoy builds a world so vivid you grieve when you leave it. The tragedy is not just Anna's. It belongs to everyone trapped in the wrong life.
All Unhappy Families
Leo Tolstoy's 1877 epic opens with one of literature's most famous lines and delivers on every promise it makes. Anna Karenina is a beautiful, intelligent married woman in Imperial Russian society who falls passionately in love with Count Vronsky, sacrificing her reputation, her son, and eventually her peace of mind. Running in parallel is the story of Levin, a landowner searching for meaning in work, faith, and love. Together they form Tolstoy's meditation on happiness, society, and what it means to live well. Nabokov called it the greatest novel ever written.
Reading Anna Karenina
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"All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
"Leo Tolstoy · Anna Karenina
Tolstoy originally conceived Anna as an unsympathetic villain. As he wrote, his feelings transformed and she became one of literature's most complex, human, and heartbreaking protagonists.
The novel was first published in serial form in The Russian Messenger between 1875 and 1877. Tolstoy himself refused to write an introduction, saying the novel spoke for itself.