Anna Karenina

Literary fiction

First published: 1877
Print length: 740 pagesDover Publications, 2004

Description

In nineteenth-century Russia, Anna Karenina enters an affair with cavalry officer Count Vronsky and rejects the emotional confinement of her marriage. Her desire for an honest life collides with a society that tolerates male infidelity while punishing a woman who openly defies convention. Alongside Anna’s increasingly precarious position, landowner Konstantin Levin pursues Kitty and searches for meaning in marriage, work, faith, and rural life. Their contrasting paths carry the novel between fashionable cities and country estates, private longing and public judgment. Trains and railway stations recur as charged spaces of departure and encounter. Through intertwined households and relationships, the novel examines how love, class, family obligation, and social hypocrisy shape the freedom its characters can imagine.

Reading profile

About this profile

Collected’s assessment, not reader ratings. Complexity runs from 1 (least demanding) to 5 (most demanding).

Writing: How much attention the sentences and language require.
Ideas: How much interpretation or abstract reasoning the book asks of you.
Structure: How much you need to keep track of speakers, timelines and connections.
Background knowledge: Prior knowledge needed to follow the book, beyond what it explains.
Emotional intensity: Emotional pressure, from gentle (1) to intense (5). Separate from difficulty.

Writing style

Dense · Descriptive · Lyrical

Pace

Measured

Tone

Intimate · Melancholic · Philosophical · Reflective

Structure

Braided · Linear

Focus

Character · Ideas · Relationships

Emotional intensity

5 / 5

Reading complexity

1–5 · higher means more demanding

Writing: 4 / 5
Ideas: 4 / 5
Structure: 4 / 5
Background knowledge: 2 / 5

Themes

ClassFamilyFreedomLoveMarriageReligion and faith

About L Tolstoy

Leo Tolstoy was a Russian writer whose career ranged from semi-autobiographical fiction and war sketches to expansive novels, shorter fiction, and works of philosophical and aesthetic argument. His early reputation grew from Childhood, Boyhood and Youth and the Sevastopol Sketches, drawn from his experience in the Crimean War. Across his mature work, he joined exacting attention to character and relationships with a persistent examination of the ideas and institutions governing ordinary conduct. War and Peace moves between private lives, aristocratic society, and historical upheaval, while Anna Karenina tests personal honesty against marriage, gendered convention, and social judgment. In The Death of Ivan Ilyich, the same moral scrutiny is concentrated into a spare confrontation with illness, respectability, and mortality. Later works such as Resurrection turn more directly toward guilt, injustice, and redemption, while What Is Art? shows Tolstoy as an argumentative critic of elite taste and cultural authority. His distinctive range lies in connecting intimate moral experience to the larger pressures of family, class, society, and history.

Book details

For the print edition listed above.

Publisher: Dover Publications
Language: English
ISBN: 9780486437965

Keep your books and notes in Collected for iPhone.

Apple Books is a service mark of Apple Inc. iPhone is a trademark of Apple Inc., registered in the U.S. and other countries.