Anna Karenina

The most direct comparison — another woman destroyed by adultery in a realist novel, but Flaubert uses ironic distance where Tolstoy uses empathetic interiority

Same author, same omniscient reach, same aristocratic Russia — but historical in scale where Anna Karenina is intimate and perfect

Another woman who cannot survive the gap between her inner life and what society permits — written 20 years later, angrier, shorter, and American

The English answer to Tolstoy — another vast social novel with a woman trapped by limited options, written by a woman who knew the trap from the inside

Tolstoy's greatest rival and the opposite approach: where Tolstoy finds faith in peasant simplicity and honest work, Dostoevsky finds it in suffering and theological argument

The German Anna Karenina — a woman destroyed by a society that demands female perfection — considered Fontane's masterpiece and directly influenced by Tolstoy