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.”
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.
Firsts & Innovations
Pioneered free indirect discourse as a sustained narrative technique — Tolstoy's blending of narrator and character voice influenced every subsequent stream-of-consciousness novelist
First major novel to render a woman's psychological disintegration from inside her own consciousness, in real time
Established the dual-plot structure as a moral argument: the two plots are not separate stories but a comparison — the same questions given two different answers
Cultural Impact
Named the greatest novel ever written by a survey of 125 international authors (BBC, 2015)
Has never been out of print in any major language since publication
Influenced every major psychological novelist: Henry James, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, and beyond
The Tolstoyan moral question — 'How should one live?' — became shorthand in philosophy and literature for the Western novel's deepest preoccupation
Adapted for film, opera, ballet, and stage across every decade since the 1910s
The opening line is the most frequently quoted first sentence in world literature after Melville's 'Call me Ishmael'
Banned & Challenged
Serialization was stopped by the editor Mikhail Katkov in 1877 when Tolstoy submitted the final installments — Katkov refused to publish them because of Tolstoy's sympathetic treatment of Slavic volunteers (Vronsky) and his implicit critique of Russian foreign policy. The novel first appeared complete as a book that same year. Later Soviet authorities viewed Tolstoy's religious themes and aristocratic subjects with deep suspicion; the novel was taught but its spiritual dimensions were consistently minimized.