Anna Karenina
Leo Tolstoy (1877)
“The most famous opening line in literature introduces the world's most devastating love story — and then spends 800 pages proving it true.”
At a Glance
Anna Karenina, a beautiful married aristocrat in 1870s Russia, falls into a passionate affair with the dashing Count Vronsky, abandoning her husband and son. The affair costs her everything — social standing, her child, her sanity — while she receives nothing in return. In the parallel plot, the earnest landowner Konstantin Levin searches for meaning through love, work, and faith, and finds it. Anna throws herself under a train. Levin finds God in a peasant's words. The novel asks which life was the right one.
Read full summary →Why This Book Matters
Published serially in The Russian Messenger (1875-1877) to enormous popular success — readers waited for each installment the way audiences waited for serial television. Dostoevsky called it 'a perfect artistic work.' Flaubert was reportedly humbled. Thomas Mann called it 'the greatest novel ever written.' It remains the most commonly cited answer to the question: 'What is the greatest novel?' It has never gone out of print.
Diction Profile
Formal, precise, psychologically dense — Tolstoy's narrator is God-like in scope and surgical in detail
Moderate in the omniscient passages