Anna Karenina for First-Time Readers: Two Love Stories, One Railway and Tolstoy's Russia

In Anna Karenina, a married St Petersburg aristocrat named Anna falls in love with the cavalry officer Count Vronsky, leaves her husband and son for him, and is slowly shut out of the society she once ruled, while in a parallel story the landowner Konstantin Levin courts Kitty, marries her and struggles to find faith and a reason to live. Leo Tolstoy published the novel in book form in 1878, after it had appeared in instalments from 1875 to 1877, mostly in the journal The Russian Messenger. It is a book about marriage, desire, family and the gap between city and country life, and it is often counted among the greatest novels ever written. This guide walks through the story, the people in it and the ideas behind it. A warning before you go on: it discusses the whole plot, including the ending.

Who wrote it, and when

Leo Tolstoy, a Russian count born on the family estate of Yasnaya Polyana south of Moscow, is regarded as one of the most influential authors of all time. He himself called Anna Karenina his first true novel, a striking claim from the author of War and Peace. Writing it was not a happy experience. By the time he was finishing the last instalments he had come to hate the work and completed it unwillingly, and his diaries show how unhappy he was with early drafts. Readers have rarely shared his doubts.

The setting matters. The story takes place against the background of the liberal reforms of Emperor Alexander II, above all the emancipation of the serfs in 1861, followed by new courts, elected local councils, the rapid growth of railways and banks, and the decline of the old landowning aristocracy. The characters argue about all of these changes at dinner tables and on country estates. When you read the book, you are watching a whole society shift under the feet of its people.

The famous first line

The novel opens with one of the most quoted sentences in literature: "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." Before that line comes an epigraph from the Bible, "Vengeance is mine; I will repay". The first sentence is not decoration. The opening scene shows an unhappy family at once: Stiva Oblonsky, Anna's charming and careless brother, has been caught in an affair with the family governess, and his wife Dolly is in despair. Anna travels from St Petersburg to Moscow to make peace between them, and that small errand sets everything else in motion.

The story in brief (spoilers)

At the Moscow railway station where Stiva meets his sister, Anna sees Vronsky for the first time. In the same moment a railway worker falls under a moving train and is killed, and Anna takes it as an evil omen. She does calm Dolly and save her brother's marriage. But at a ball that evening, Vronsky, who had been flirting with the eighteen-year-old Kitty, dances with Anna instead, and Kitty, who has just refused a proposal from Levin, is left heartbroken.

Back in St Petersburg, Anna begins an affair with Vronsky. Her husband, Alexei Karenin, a senior government official twenty years older than she is, cares most about appearances. After Vronsky falls during a steeplechase, Anna cannot hide her fear, and she confesses the affair to Karenin, who demands that she stop it to avoid gossip. Divorce in Russia at the time was difficult and humiliating, and the question of whether Karenin will grant one runs through the rest of the book.

Anna nearly dies giving birth to Vronsky's daughter, and at her bedside Karenin forgives them both. The moment does not last. Anna and Vronsky leave for Italy, leaving behind her son Seryozha. Abroad they are free, but bored. When they return to Russia, the difference between their positions becomes painful: Vronsky can move freely in society, while Anna is shut out. At the theatre she is openly snubbed by former friends, and the couple retreat to Vronsky's country estate.

Meanwhile Levin and Kitty are reconciled, marry and settle on his estate. Their marriage is not perfect. Levin is jealous and restless, and the early months are hard. But together they nurse Levin's dying brother, and Kitty's quiet competence deepens his love for her. Their son is born near the end of the book.

Anna's situation, by contrast, keeps getting worse. Isolated, dependent on morphine to sleep and tormented by jealousy, she becomes convinced that Vronsky no longer loves her. After a bitter quarrel, she takes her own life at a railway station, echoing the death she witnessed when she first met him. The novel treats this moment seriously and without glamour. In the final part, Vronsky leaves to fight as a volunteer in the Serbian war against the Ottoman Empire, Karenin takes in Anna's daughter, and Levin, after a long conversation with a peasant, finds his way back to faith and decides that his life can be oriented towards goodness even though he will keep making mistakes.

The main characters

Anna Arkadyevna Karenina is intelligent, warm and magnetic, and she is the one person in the book who refuses to live a lie. That honesty is part of what destroys her. Count Alexei Vronsky is handsome, brave and not especially deep; he loves Anna sincerely, but he does not lose as much as she does. Alexei Karenin, her husband, is stiff and formal, yet Tolstoy gives him moments of real generosity.

Konstantin Levin is a landowner who prefers the country to the city and worries about farming, peasants and the meaning of life. He is often seen as Tolstoy's alter ego: the name Levin comes from Lev, Tolstoy's own first name, and Levin proposes to Kitty in the same unusual way that Tolstoy proposed to his wife, Sophia Behrs. Kitty Shcherbatskaya grows from a dazzled young debutante into a capable, grounded woman. Dolly, worn down by children and an unfaithful husband, is one of the most quietly observant people in the novel, and Stiva, her husband, is so likeable that readers forgive him far more easily than society forgives his sister.

What the novel is about

On the surface it is a story of adultery, but Tolstoy builds something much wider. Critics point to themes of hypocrisy, jealousy, faith, fidelity, family, marriage, social progress, desire, and the connection to the land as opposed to life in the city. The two main plots are designed to be read against each other. Anna follows passion and is crushed by a society that punishes women far more harshly than men. Levin follows doubt and work and arrives, slowly, at a kind of peace. Neither path is presented as simple.

Trains run through the whole book. Major scenes take place on passenger trains or in stations, and the railway, a symbol of the new Russia, is linked with Anna's fate from the first chapters. The translator Rosemary Edmonds observed that Tolstoy does not preach openly in the novel but lets his themes rise naturally from the vast panorama of Russian life, and that one of its key messages is that no one may build their happiness on another's pain. Many critics also see the book as a bridge between the realist novel of the nineteenth century and the modernist novel that followed.

How readers received it

Fellow writers were impressed almost at once. In 1877 Fyodor Dostoevsky called the novel perfect as a work of art and said that nothing in European literature of the time could compare with it. William Faulkner, asked for the three greatest novels, answered with the same title three times, and Vladimir Nabokov called it one of the greatest love stories in world literature. Not every early reader was won over: in the United States some reviewers praised its themes and heroine but complained about its length and its depiction of suicide.

The book has been adapted for theatre, opera, film, television, ballet, radio and even figure skating. Greta Garbo starred in an influential 1935 film version. If you have read Tolstoy's War and Peace or Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, you will notice that Anna Karenina is more intimate than either: its battles happen in drawing rooms, nurseries and railway carriages.

Tips for reading it

The novel is long, roughly a thousand pages in eight parts, so it helps to know that the Levin chapters are not a detour. They are the other half of the argument. Russian names can confuse new readers, because characters are called by first name and patronymic, by nicknames such as Stiva, Kostya and Dolly, and by surnames. Keep a small list of names at the front of your copy and the crowd will soon feel familiar. Some English translations even call the book Anna Karenin, using the masculine form of the surname, while others keep the Russian feminine ending.

Learn with Anna Karenina: English phrases

Phrase	Meaning	Example
every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way	each problem has its own causes	Our neighbours fight about money; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
to be shut out of society	to be excluded by other people	After the scandal she was shut out of society.
an evil omen	a sign that something bad will happen	He saw the broken mirror as an evil omen.
to keep up appearances	to hide problems to look respectable	Karenin only wanted to keep up appearances.
to build your happiness on someone else's pain	to gain by hurting others	You can't build your happiness on someone else's pain.

Try this: Write three English sentences about a family you know from a book or film, using "keep up appearances" and "every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way".