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.”
Character Analysis
Beautiful, intelligent, morally serious, and doomed. Anna is not destroyed by passion alone — she is destroyed by a society that leaves her no viable path once she has stepped outside its rules. The tragedy is not that she chose Vronsky; it is that every alternative was worse. Tolstoy feels for her even as he structures her end.
Formal, precise Petersburg aristocrat's diction — warm without being soft, brilliant without being cold. Her language is the language of someone who has always been understood and valued. As she deteriorates, her sentences grow more clipped, her observations more extreme.