The recap
Anna Karenina has everything St. Petersburg society prizes: beauty, wit, a high-ranking husband and a young son she adores. Then, on a trip to Moscow to patch up her brother's crumbling marriage, she meets Count Vronsky, a dashing cavalry officer, and an attraction neither can shake begins to unravel the careful order of her life. Running alongside her story is that of Konstantin Levin, an earnest, awkward landowner who loves the young Kitty Shcherbatskaya and wrestles with farming, faith and the meaning of a good life far from the glittering salons. Tolstoy moves between ballrooms, racecourses, country estates and nurseries, setting a passionate affair against a slower, quieter kind of love, and asking what each one costs in a world quick to judge women and forgive men. Vast yet intimate, it remains one of the great novels about desire, marriage and the hunger for an honest life.
Why read it
For readers ready to sink into a big, absorbing novel where a scandalous affair and a hard-won marriage illuminate each other, and for anyone who assumes a Russian classic must be heavy going.
Fun facts
- 01
Tolstoy started the novel in March 1873 after leafing through a Pushkin prose fragment that opens with guests arriving at a country house, reportedly remarking that this was the way to begin.
- 02
It first ran in installments in The Russian Messenger from 1875 to 1877, but a clash with editor Mikhail Katkov over the final part meant the complete novel first appeared as a book in 1878.
- 03
Levin is widely read as Tolstoy's alter ego, and his courtship of Kitty borrows from Tolstoy's own courtship of Sofya Behrs.
- 04
Asked to name the three greatest novels ever written, William Faulkner is said to have named this one three times over.
- 05
Joe Wright's 2012 film, scripted by Tom Stoppard and starring Keira Knightley, staged much of the story inside a theatre.
